fail, MonadFail, or MonadPlus? (was Re: broken Monad Either instance?)

[Iavor Diatchki]

Hi,
this is the way things used to be in Haskell 1.4 (if you are curious
take a look at page 21 of
http://haskell.org/definition/haskell-report-1.4.ps.gz).  I am not
exactly sure why the change with the "fail" method happened but I
think it had something to do with concerns that depending on the
pattern your program might get a different constraint (e.g. Monad vs.
MonadPlus).   To me this seems perfectly reasonable I don't know why
it was perceived as a problem.
-Iavor
PS: I believe at the time of Haskell 1.4 the MonadPlus class was split
into two parts MoandZero with just "zero" and a superclass that added
the "plus" method.  The idea is the same though.


On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> With a separate MonadFail class we have 4 options:
>>
>> 1) Simply translate to: "e >>= \p -> do{stmts}" instead. This means
>> pattern match errors are always turned into errors.
>>
>> 2) Give all do-expressions a MonadFail constraint.
>>
>> 3) Only give do-expressions with pattern bindings a MonadFail constraint.
>>
>> 4) Only give do-expressions with pattern bindings with uncomplete
>> patterns a MonadFail constraint.
>
> I'm sure this has been brought up in the many 'fail' discussions that
> have occurred, but what about MonadPlus and substituting a refuted
> pattern match with mzero?  The only time I've used refutable pattern
> matches is in a list or parser where something like "'a' <-
> Parse.char" is convenient.  What about pattern matches desugaring as
> something like
>
> tmp <- Parse.char
> case tmp of
>  'a' -> { ... rest of do block ... }
>  _ -> mzero
>
> Of course that just replaces MonadFail with MonadPlus and how to
> decide if the extra constraint is needed is still unsolved, but at
> least it's an already existing class.
>
> I originally wanted to ask for uses of 'fail', because I haven't heard
> of any of those, but then I thought of how I use refutable pattern
> matches.  And then that made me think the way fail takes a String is
> awkward and weird and none of my refutable matches make use of that
> fact.  Then that made me think reusing MonadPlus's mzero seemed more
> appropriate.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Libraries mailing list
> Libraries at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries