On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 09:38 +0000, Ross Paterson wrote: > On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 09:52:01AM +1100, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote: > > ross: > > > why do you need a Put monad, which always seems to have > > > the argument type ()? Monoids really are underappreciated. > > > > For the syntax, and So that people can directly port their code from > > NewBinary. (The instances are basically unchanged). > > And so the successor to binary must have the same interface, and so on > forever. The backward compatibility argument seems weak to me, leaving > only the advantage of do-notation. > > Monads are the new lists.
I was about to say that for the more complicated binary serialisation formats (eg GHC's .hi format) people need monads with state, like string pools etc, but actually now that I think about it, that can be done with a monoid too. Ross, you need to make a monoid transformer library (at least reader and state) and campaign for ++ to be redefined as mappend, then everyone will want to use it since it'll be so neat and convenient! :-) Can anyone see a real serialisation use case that needs a monad for the serialisation side? I'd thought I had an example, but I was wrong. Duncan _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
