Abstract not found

In a recent paper, Launchbury, Lewis, and Cook observe that some Haskell applications could benefit from a combinator mfix for expressing recursion over monadic types. We investigate three possible definitions of mfix and implement them in Haskell. Like traditional fixpoint operators, there are two approaches to the definition of mfix: an unfolding one based on mathematical semantics, and an updating one based on operational semantics. The two definitions are equivalent in pure calculi but have different behaviors when used within monads. The unfolding version can be easily defined in Haskell if one restricts fixpoints to function types. The updating version is much more challenging to define in Haskell despite the fact that its definition is straightforward in Scheme. After studying the Scheme definition in detail, we mirror it in Haskell using the primitive unsafePerformIO. The resulting definition of mfix appears to work well but proves to be unsafe, in the sense that i...