[Haskell-cafe] GHCi infers a type but refuses it as type signature

[David Menendez]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Wei Hu<wei.hoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Could you or anyone else briefly explain how mmtl solves the
> combinatorical explosion problem? Reading the source code is not very
> productive for newbies like me. Thanks!

It's a good question, since from what I can tell mmtl does not solve
the problem.

Some quick background: If you have M monad transformers and N classes
of operations, you normally need M*N instance declarations, i.e., one
per transformer per class. Each instance either provides the
functionality directly, such as the MonadState instance for StateT, or
promotes it from the underlying monad, such as the MonadState instance
for ReaderT.

mmtl instead provides 2*M instances. For each transformer, it has one
direct instance (such as MonadState (StateT s m)) and one instance
which promotes through any transformer (such as MonadState (t (StateT
s m))).

The problem is that this limits you to using at most two transformers
at a time. For example, the type ErrorT String (ReaderT Int (StateT
Int m)) is an instance of MonadError and MonadReader, but not
MonadState because it doesn't have the form t (StateT s m).

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