Pattern guards

[Yitzchak Gale]

I wrote:
>> ...the main monad at work here is the Exit monad.

Ross Paterson wrote:
> ...if we define
>         exitMaybe :: Exit e () -> Maybe e
>         exitMaybe (Continue _) = Nothing
>         exitMaybe (Exit e) = Just e
> then we have
>         runExit m = fromJust (exitMaybe m)
>         exitMaybe (x >> y) = exitMaybe x `mplus` exitMaybe y
>         exitMaybe (maybeExit m) = m
> so we can replace the Exit monad with Maybe.

Maybe monads quit on failure and
continue on success. We want the opposite
semantics for guards, pattern matching, and
the like. The Exit monad is the dual of the
Maybe monad in this sense.

In particular, your identity

> exitMaybe (x >> y) = exitMaybe x `mplus` exitMaybe y

is not true. If we let x = Continue ()  and y = Exit z, then

exitMaybe (x >> y) = Just z

but

exitMaybe x `mplus` exitMaybe y = Nothing

-Yitz