Derek Elkins wrote:
Ryan Ingram wrote:
apfelmus wrote:
A context passing implementation (yielding the ContT monad
transformer)
will remedy this.
Wait, are you saying that if you apply ContT to any monad that has the
"left recursion on >>= takes quadratic time" problem, and represent
all primitive operations via lift (never using >>= within "lift"),
that you will get a new monad that doesn't have that problem?
If so, that's pretty cool.
To be clear, by ContT I mean this monad:
newtype ContT m a = ContT { runContT :: forall b. (a -> m b) -> m b }
instance Monad m => Monad (ContT m) where
return x = ContT $ \c -> c x
m >>= f = ContT $ \c -> runContT m $ \a -> runContT (f a) c
fail = lift . fail
instance MonadTrans ContT where
lift m = ContT $ \c -> m >>= c
evalContT :: Monad m => ContT m a -> m a
evalContT m = runContT m return
Yes, that's the case because the only way to use >>= from the old monad
is via lift. Since only primitive operations are being lifted into the
left of >>=, it's only nested in a right-associative fashion. The
remaining thing to prove is that ContT itself doesn't have the
left-associativity problem or any other similar problem. It's pretty
intuitive, but unfortunately, I currently don't know how to prove or
even specify that exactly. The problem is that expressions with >>=
contain arbitrary unapplied lambda abstractions and mixed types but the
types shouldn't be much a minor problem.
Indeed this was discussed on #haskell a few weeks ago. That information
has been put on the wiki at
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Performance/Monads
and refers to a blog post http://r6.ca/blog/20071028T162529Z.html that
describes it in action.
Note that the crux of the Maybe example on the wiki page is not curing a
left-associativity problem, Maybe doesn't have one. The key point here
is that continuation passing style allows us to inline the liftings
(Just x >>=) = \f -> f x
(Nothing >>=) = \_ -> Nothing
and thus eliminate lots of case analysis. (Btw, this is exactly the
behavior of exceptions in an imperative language.)
(Concerning the blog post, it looks like this inlining brings speed. But
Data.Sequence is not to be underestimated, it may well be responsible
for the meat of the speedup.)
I'm fairly confident, though I'd have to actually work through it, that
the Unimo work, http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~cklin/ could benefit from
this. In fact, I think this does much of what Unimo does and could
capture many of the same things.
Well, Unimo doesn't have the left-associativity problem in the first
place, so the "only" motive for using ContT Prompt instead is to
eliminate the Bind constructor and implied case analyses.
But there's a slight yet important difference between Unimo p a and
Unimo' p a = ContT (Prompt p) a , namely the ability the run the
continuation in the "outer" monad. Let me explain: in the original
Unimo, we have a helper function
observe_monad :: (a -> v)
-> (forall b . p (Unimo p) b -> (b -> Unimo p a) -> v)
-> (Unimo p a -> v)
for running a monad. For simplicity and to match with Ryan's prompt,
we'll drop the fact that p can be parametrized on the "outer" monad,
i.e. we consider
observe_monad :: (a -> v)
-> (forall b . p b -> (b -> Unimo p a) -> v)
-> (Unimo p a -> v)
This is just the case expression for the data type
data PromptU p a where
Return :: a -> PromptU p a
BindEffect :: p b -> (b -> Unimo p a) -> PromptU p a
observe_monad :: (PromptU p a -> v) -> (Unimo p a -> v)
The difference I'm after is that the second argument to BindEffect is
free to return an Unimo and not only another PromptU! This is quite
handy for writing monads.
In contrast, things for Unimo' p a = ContT (Prompt p) a are as follows:
data Prompt p a where
Return :: a -> Prompt p a
BindEffect :: p b -> (b -> Prompt p a) -> Prompt p a
observe :: (Prompt p a -> v) -> (Unimo' p a -> v)
observe f m = f (runCont m Return)
Here, we don't have access to the "outer" monad Unimo' p a when
defining an argument f to observe. I don't think we can fix that by
allowing the second argument of BindEffect to return an Unimo' p a
since in this case,
lift :: p a -> Unimo' p a
lift x = Cont $ BindEffect x
won't work anymore.
Of course, the question now is whether this can be fixed. Put
differently, this is the question I keep asking: does it allow Unimo
to implement strictly more monads than ContT = Unimo' or is the latter
enough? I.e. can every monad be implemented with ContT?
Regards,
apfelmus
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