mapM /= traverse?

[Dan Doel]

Okay. I talked with some folks, and I now understand why this matters for
you.

I can't think of a fusion reason for the custom definition. traverse is a
foldr same as the particular mapM. I think it's just an oversight.

Since the type doesn't even change, we should be able to fix this in
7.10.2, no?

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 3:58 AM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/05/2015 22:41, Dan Doel wrote:
>
>> The reason I know of why mapM wasn't just made to be an alias for
>> traverse (assuming that's what you mean) was that it was thought that
>> particular definitions of mapM could be more efficient than traverse.
>> For instance:
>>
>>      mapM :: Monad m => (a -> m b) -> [a] -> m [b]
>>      mapM f = go []
>>        where
>>        go ys [] = return (reverse ys)
>>        go ys (x:xs) = f x >>= \y -> go (y:ys) xs
>>
>> This doesn't use stack for m = IO, for instance.
>>
>> However, it has since been pointed out (to me and Ed, at least), that
>> this matters much less now. Stack overflows are now off by default, and
>> if you measure the overall time and memory usage, traverse compares
>> favorably to this custom mapM. So, as long as stack isn't an
>> artificially scarce resource, there's no reason to keep them distinct.
>> We didn't know this until after 7.10, though.
>>
>> If you're just asking why the definition of 'mapM' for lists isn't
>> 'traverse' with a more specific type, I don't know the answer to that.
>>
>
> Yes, I'm not really concerned that mapM is a method of Traversable rather
> than just being an alias for traverse, but I'm wondering why we define it
> in the list instance rather than using the default.
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>
>  -- Dan
>>
>>
>> On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com
>> <mailto:marlowsd at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     I was hoping that in GHC 7.10 we would make mapM = traverse for
>>     lists, but it appears this isn't the case: the Traversable instance
>>     for lists overrides mapM to be the manually-defined version in terms
>>     of foldr.
>>
>>     Why is this?  Fusion?
>>
>>     Unfortunately since I want mapM = traverse (for Haxl) I'll need to
>>     continue to redefine it in our custom Prelude.
>>
>>     Cheers,
>>     Simon
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>>
>>
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