MonadFail proposal (MFP): Moving fail out of Monad

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On 2015-06-09 at 23:56:59 +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:

[...]

> You think about making MonadFail a subclass of Applicative where the
> name MonadFail becomes misleading - how about naming it Fail instead?

'Fail' would be a good name, if it became an independent class (w/o a
superclass to either 'Applicative' or 'Monad'). But the cost for that is
having to use `(Fail m, Monad m) =>`

Or rely on e.g. constraint synonyms, via e.g.

  {-# LANGUAGE ConstraintKinds #-}
  type MonadFail m       = (Fail m, Monad m)
  type ApplicativeFail m = (Fail m, Applicative m)

for convenience.

I've also heard the suggestion 'FailDo', which could make sense if it
became a superclass of Applicative (but then we'd still have to use
'(FailDo m, Monad m)' or a constraint-synonym for the majority of cases,
where 'fail' is used in a 'Monad' context)

Otoh, the reason I suggested to just go w/ 'MonadFail' to keep it simple
was that I doubted that that 'fail' in a '-XApplicativeDo' made much
sense. But maybe it does make sense?

I.e. while 'fail' has laws w/ 'Monad', what would be the respective laws
for 'fail' in an 'Applicative' context?

Cheers,
  hvr