[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: error-message

[Ross Paterson]

On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 03:50:55PM -0500, Brent Yorgey wrote:
> So what we have here, it seems, is a type with at least two reasonable
> Applicative instances, one of which does *not* correspond to a Monad
> instance.  My argument is that it is very strange (I might even go so
> far as to call it a bug) to have a type with an Applicative instance
> and a Monad instance which do not correspond, in the sense that
> 
>   pure  = return
>   (<*>) = ap

There are several of these.  Another is the possible Applicative instance
for lists with

    pure  = repeat
    (<*>) = zipWith id

In these cases we usually make the Applicative instance match the Monad
one and define an equivalent type for each other Applicative instance
(e.g. ZipList in Control.Applicative).