type aliases in instances

Richard Uhtenwoldt ru@river.org
Sat, 09 Mar 2002 12:57:07 -0800


I do not have experience commposing monads (maybe John Hughes can
chime in?), but I'll address where Bernhard Reus writes:

>This can be avoided by using type
>aliases but then the monads in use cannot be instances of the Monad
>class. 
>But not declaring the monads to be in class Monad can hardly
>be good style, can it?

GHC's source code defines many monads not in class Monad.
I'll write some untested code to give an idea of
the naming conventions used:

type FooMd out = (a,b,c)->((a,b,c),out)
returnFooMd out = \s0->out
thenFooMd p k = \s0->let (s,out) = p s0
                     in  k out s
method1FooMd ... = ...
method2FooMd ... = ...

the biggest disadvantage is that you cannot use
the do notation but rather have to write, eg,

    method1FooMd x y       `thenFooMd` (\result1->
    method2FooMd z result1 `thenFooMd` (\result2->
    ...

of course, you also cannot use liftM and other library functions with
(Monad m)=> in their signature, but I do not mind that so much as loss
of the do notation.
-- 
Richard Uhtenwoldt