mtl: Context of execWriterT

[Daniel Fischer]

On Thursday 14 April 2011 14:25:39, Daniel Díaz wrote:
>  Hi,
> 
>  I have a question about the context of the execWriterT function, in
>  Control.Monad.Writer of the mtl package. The current context forces the
>  containter type to be a Monad, while is enough a Functor. Yes, WriterT
>  is a monad transformer, so this is not a problem, but I have as a law
> to write the less restrictive context for every function.
> 
>  So, is there any reason to do this context more restrictive?

Alas, Functor is not a superclass of Monad, so a Monad constraint is not 
more restrictive than a Functor constraint.

And e.g. in mtl-2.*, we have

instance Functor m =>
         Functor (Control.Monad.Trans.State.Lazy.StateT s m)

which used to have a Monad constraint (same for WriterT), a change that 
broke some code (previously, one could have

foo :: (Monad m) => ... StateT s m a ...
foo -- uses the Functor instance

, now you have to have

foo :: (Monad m, Functor m) => ... StateT s m a ...

if you use both, Functor and Monad, in foo).

> 
>  If not, the obvious way to do it may be:
> 
>  execWriterT :: Functor m => WriterT w m a -> m w
>  execWriterT = fmap snd . runWriterT
> 
>  However, I thought that there must be a reason explaining this fact.
>