[Haskell-cafe] control-monad-failure and mtl

[Jose Iborra]

On 28/11/2009, at 22:08, Edward Z. Yang wrote:

> Hello folks,
> 
> I took advantage of Thanksgiving weekend to port my application to use
> Control.Monad.Failure, and learned (slightly painfully) that I still
> needed to pick some mechanism to instantiate my failure monads as.
> After the experience, I have three questions/comments:
> 
> 1. Why isn't there an instance for Either in mtl? (There is one for
> Transformers.  The error message left me very puzzled there: the docs
> clearly claimed the instance existed, and only a little source code
> diving elucidated the situation.)  Copying the instance declaration
> from the transformers version seems to fix it.
> 

There is indeed an Monad instance for Either in mtl,
declared in the module Control.Monad.Error.
I can't explain why your compiler cannot find it.
Can you paste a blurb of code somewhere?


> 2. I was having difficulty instantiating MonadFailure as an ErrorT
> for an arbitrary monad.  Here is an example:
> 
>    {-# LANGUAGE PackageImports, FlexibleContexts #-}
> 
>    import "mtl" Control.Monad.Error
>    import "mtl" Control.Monad.State
>    import Control.Monad.Failure
> 
>    data MyError = MyError String
>    instance Error MyError where
>        strMsg = MyError
> 
>    type MyMonad = ErrorT MyError (State Integer)
> 
>    failureFunction :: MonadFailure MyError m => Integer -> m Integer
>    failureFunction 0 = failure $ MyError "Cannot use zero"
>    failureFunction n = return (n - 1)
> 
>    -- instantiate
>    monadicFunction :: MyMonad Integer
>    monadicFunction = failureFunction 23
> 
> Which results in the following error:
> 
>    failure.hs:19:18:
>        No instance for (MonadFailure
>                           MyError (ErrorT MyError (State Integer)))
>          arising from a use of `failureFunction' at failure.hs:19:18-35
>        Possible fix:
>          add an instance declaration for
>          (MonadFailure MyError (ErrorT MyError (State Integer)))
>        In the expression: failureFunction 23
>        In the definition of `monadicFunction':
>            monadicFunction = failureFunction 23
> 
> Which seems to contradict the documentation and source code, which states:
> 
>    Instances: [...]
>        (Error e, Monad m) => MonadFailure e (ErrorT e m)
> 
> How do I misunderstand?
> 

You need to import Control.Monad.Failure.MTL in order to bring the MTL instances into scope.
The reason for this is that we provide instances both for MTL and transformers in the same 
package. These have to live in different modules to avoid a conflict due to the duplicated 
monad instance for Either.


> 3. In a motivating example, one of the goals of MonadFailure is to let
> us mix the error code of third-party modules into the generic failure mode.
> Control.Monad.Failure appears to give the machinery for instantiating a generic
> failure monad, but it doesn't have any facilities for the opposite direction:
> that is, marshalling a specific error form into the generic error form.  Am I
> mistaken, and if not, would it be a welcome addition to the library?

Very likely. Existing error handling packages such as control-monad-exception and attempt
already provide this feature to convert other error forms into their specific error types.
If this can be abstracted cleanly for a generic form of failure,
then I would definitely support including it in control-monad-failure.

Thanks,
pepe