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The Other Prelude

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Contents

1 Call for contribution

This fun project, called "The Other Prelude", and is a creative reconstruction of the standard Prelude. By disregarding history and compatibility, we get a clean sheet.

2 Naming conventions

The principal is to make the names very readable for both beginners and category theorists (if any).

3 Guidelines

  • The prelude should not contain any "projection" functions (like
    fst
    and
    snd
    . They go to the Extension module.


4 Issues

  • Should alphanumeric names be preferred over symbols when defining a class?
  • Why do many functions in Prelude use
    Int
    instead of
    Integer
    ? IMO,
    Integer
    should be THE preferred datatype for everything (examples: length, splitAt, replicate, drop, take, ...)!


5 The hierarchy

  • TheOtherPrelude
    - Minimalistic module.
  • TheOtherPrelude.Extension
    - Convenient definitions.

6 The code

Currently, the code is in Wiki form. If people do agree that the collaborative decisions begot something pretty, we'll have a group of files in darcs.haskell.org some time.

The imaginery Prelude as it stands, 

import Prelude ()    -- hide everything
 
-- the idea is to remove 'fmap' 
-- and map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b] to be a special case
-- as well as having (.) :: (a -> b) -> (e -> a) -> (e -> b) as a
-- special case from the Functor instance for ((->) e)
-- Both notations can be provided to allow for clarity in different situations.
class Functor f where
  map, (.) :: (a -> b) -> f a -> f b
  map = (.)
  (.) = map
 
-- the following has been shamelessly copied 
-- from the functor hierarchy proposal wiki page
class Functor f => Applicative f where
  return :: a -> f a
  (<*>) :: f (a -> b) -> f a -> f b   -- or should this be named 'ap'? 
                                      -- or something even better?
                                      -- could this nice looking function
                                      -- refactor the liftM* idioms?
 
  (>>) :: f a -> f b -> f b
  fa >> fb = (map (const id) fa) <*> fb
 
-- this leaves little left for the actual Monad class
class (Applicative m) => Monad m where
  (>>=) :: m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b
  join :: m (m a) -> m a
 
  x >>= f = join (map f x)
  join x = x >>= id
 
-- end of Functor hierarchy dilemma
 
-- zero will be used when pattern matching against refutable patterns in
-- do-notation as well as to provide support for monad comprehensions.
class (Monad m) => MonadZero m where
  zero :: m a
 
class (MonadZero m) => MonadPlus m where
  (++) :: m a -> m a -> m a
 
class (MonadZero m) => MonadOr m where
  orElse :: m a -> m a -> m a

How to use it, as it stands, 

import Prelude ()                                    -- hide everything
import TheOtherPrelude                               -- get everything
import qualified TheOtherPrelude.Monad.Kleisli as M  -- standard convention

7 See also

Retrieved from "http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_Other_Prelude"

Categories: Proposals | Mathematics | Code