consider the following examples:
-- do-notation: explicit return; explicit guard; monadic result
d _ = do { Just b <- return (Just True); guard b; return 42 }
-- list comprehension: explicit return; implicit guard; monadic (list) result
lc _ = [ 42 | Just b <- return (Just True), b ]
-- pattern guard: implicit return; implicit guard; non-monadic result
pg _ | Just b <- Just True, b = 42
This ongoing discussion has made me curious about whether we could actually
get rid of these irregularities in the language, without losing any of the
features
we like so much.
=== attempt 1
(a) boolean statements vs guards
this looks straightforward. Bool is a type, so can never be an instance of
constructor class Monad, so a boolean statement in a monadic context is
always invalid at the moment. that means we could simply extend our
syntactic sugar to take account of types, and read every
((e :: Bool) :: Monad m => m _)
in a statement of a do block as a shorthand for
(guard (e :: Bool) :: Monad m => m ())
(b) missing return in pattern guards
this could be made to fit the general pattern, if we had (return == id).
that would put us into the Identity monad, which seems fine at first,
since we only need return, bind, guard, and fail. unfortunately, those
are only the requirements for a single pattern guard - to handle not
just failure, but also fall-through, we also need mplus. which means
that the Identity monad does not have enough structure, we need at
least Maybe..
this first attempt leaves us with two problems. not only is (return==id)
not sufficient for (b), but the suggested approach to (a) is also not very
haskellish: instead of having syntactic sugar depend on type information,
the typical haskell approach is to have type-independent sugar that
introduces overloaded operations, such as
fromInteger :: Num a => Integer -> a
to be resolved by the usual type class machinery. addressing these two
issues leads us to
=== attempt 2
(a) overloading Bool
following the approach of Num and overloaded numeric literals, we could
introduce a type class Boolean
class Boolean b where
fromBool :: Bool -> b
instance Boolean Bool where
fromBool = id
and implicitly translate every literal expression of type Bool
True ~~> fromBool True
False ~~> fromBool False
now we can embed Boolean statements as monadic statements simply by
defining an additional instance
instance MonadPlus m => Boolean (m ()) where
fromBool = guard
(b) adding a strictly matching monadic let
we can't just have (return==id), and we do not want the hassle of having to
write
pattern <- return expr
in pattern guards. the alternative of using let doesn't work either
let pattern = expr
because we do want pattern match failure to abort the pattern guard and
lead to overall match failure and fall-through. so what we really seem to want
is a shorthand notation for a strict variant of monadic let bindings. apfelmus
suggested to use '<=' for this purpose, so that, wherever monadic generators
are permitted
pattern <= expr ~~> pattern <- return expr
===
returning to the examples, the approach of attempt 2 would allow us to write
-- do-notation: implicit return; implicit guard; monadic result
d _ = do { Just b <= Just True; b; return 42 }
-- list comprehension: implicit return; implicit guard; monadic (list) result
lc _ = [ 42 | Just b <= Just True, b ]
-- pattern guard: implicit return; implicit guard; non-monadic result
pg _ | Just b <= Just True, b = 42
almost resolving the irregularities, and permitting uniform handling of related
syntactic constructs. hooray!-)
I say "almost", because Bool permeates large parts of language and libraries,
so one would need to check every occurence of the type and possibly
replace Bool by (Boolean b => b). the Boolean Bool instance should mean
that this process could be incremental (ie, even without replacements, things
should still work, with more replacements generalizing more functionality,
similar to the Int vs Integer issue), but that hope ought to be tested in
practice.
one issue arising in practice is that we would like to have
fromBool :: MonadPlus m => Bool -> m a
but the current definition of guard would fix the type to
fromBool :: MonadPlus m => Bool -> m ()
which would require type annotations for Booleans used as guards. see the
attached example for an easy workaround.
on the positive side, this approach would not just make pattern guards more
regular, but '<=' and 'MonadPlus m => Boolean (m ()) would be useful for
monadic code in general. even better than that, those of use doing embedded
DSLs in Haskell have been looking for a way to overload Bools for a long
time, and the implicit 'Boolean b => fromBool :: Bool -> b' ought to get us
started in the right direction. most likely, we would need more Bool-based
constructs to be overloaded for Boolean, including at least a function
equivalent for if-then-else:
class If condition branch where
if' :: condition -> branch -> branch -> branch
instance If Bool e where
if' c t e = if c then t else e
instance Monad m => If (m Bool) (m a) where
if' c t e = c >>= \b-> if b then t else e
with associated desugaring
if b then t else e ~~> if' b t e
which would also enable us to get around another do notation annoyance,
and write things like
if (fmap read getLine :: IO Bool)
then putStrLn "hi"
else putStrLn "ho"
all in all, this looks promising, so: thank you, Yitzchak, for insistencing in
pointing out the inconsistencies of '<-' (it did cost me some sleep, but I like
the results so far!-)
I assume there might be downsides as well - any suggestions?
Claus
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