It seems to me that there are two possible reasons for implementing
category theoretic structures in FriCAS:
1) Because FriCAS should implement as many mathematical structures as
possible and because much of modern mathematics is done in the language
of categories and FriCAS should reflect the structures mathematicians
are using.
2) To implement Haskel-like structures. This is aimed at separating the
'pure' from the 'impure' in particular chaining together sequences of
potentially impure functions.
I think this distinction is important because it determines what type of
structure is used. In the first case we might use this:
class Monad m where
unit :: a -> m a
mult :: m (m a) -> m a
But in the second case we might use this:
class Monad m where
(>>=) :: m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b
(>>) :: m a -> m b -> m b
return :: a -> m a
fail :: String -> m a
So in the case of Maybe, in the second case we could chain together a
whole sequence of functions with a signature like this:
Something -> Maybe Something
into a combined function, this would mean that we would not have to test
for "fail" in-between each function call.
In the first case we would have a structure like this:
Maybe (Maybe Something)
which, presumably would return "fail" if either the inner or outer Maybe
failed.
I suspect this is all a bit academic because I get the impression that
the FriCAS compiler is too unpredictable to make the changes to the type
system that would be required for a more general category theoretic
structures. Please tell me I'm wrong as it would be really wonderful if
FriCAS could support this in its most general form.
Martin B
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS -
computer algebra system" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to fricas-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to fricas-devel@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
