Proposal: Applicative => Monad: Call for consensus

[David Menendez]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 10:36 PM, Tyson Whitehead <twhitehead at gmail.com> wrote:
> On January 17, 2011 19:24:12 Jan-Willem Maessen wrote:
>> > join (CPS f) = CPS $ \k -> unCPS (f id) k
>>
> <snip>
>>
>> Using these definitions, and join = (>>= id), we obtain:
>>
>> join (CPS cca) = CPS (\k -> cca (\ca -> unCPS ca k))
>
> That is the same.  The key is that the final computation here is unCPS ca k.
> Delaying the application of k (returning unCPS ca and then applying k gives
> the same result as directly applying unCPS ca k and returning it) we get
>
> join (CPS cca) = CPS (\k -> cca (\ca -> unCPS ca k))
> join (CPS cca) = CPS (\k -> cca (\ca -> unCPS ca) k)
>
> Now, delaying the transformation by unCPS (returning ca and then forming unCPS
> ca gives the same result as directly forming unCPS ca and returning it) we get
>
> join (CPS cca) = CPS (\k -> unCPS (cca (\ca -> ca)) k)
> join (CPS cca) = CPS (\k -> unCPS (cca id) k)
>
> which brings us back to the above.

How are you defining CPS? In order to use id as a continuation in
these circumstances, you pretty much need

newtype CPS a = CPS { unCPS :: forall w. (a -> w) -> w }

But that's (mostly) isomorphic to the Identity monad (i.e., you can't
define callCC).

The advantage of Jan-Willem's definition is that you can use it with
the more-familiar Cont monad. I'd argue that it's truer to the sense
of continuation passing as well.

-- 
Dave Menendez <dave at zednenem.com>
<http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>