Category theorists invented monads in the 1960's to concisely express certain aspects of universal algebra. Functional programmers invented list comprehensions in the 1970's to concisely express certain programs involving lists. This paper shows how list comprehensions may be generalised to an arbitrary monad, and how the resulting programming feature can concisely express in a pure functional language some programs that manipulate state, handle exceptions, parse text, or invoke continuations. A new solution to the old problem of destructive array update is also presented. No knowledge of category theory is assumed.

A criticism often levelled at functional languages is that they do not cope elegantly or efficiently with problems involving changes of state. In a recent paper [26], Wadler has proposed a new approach to these problems. His proposal involves the use of a type system based on the linear logic of Girard [7]. This allows the programmer to specify the "natural" imperative operations without at the same time sacrificing the crucial property of referential transparency. In this paper we investigate the practicality of Wadler's approach, describing the design and implementation of a variant of Lazy ML [2]. A small example program shows how imperative operations can be used in a referentially transparent way, and at the same time it highlights some of the problems with the approach. Our implementation is based on a variant of the G-machine [15, 1]. We give some benchmark figures to compare the performance of our machine with the original one. The results are disappointing: the cost of maintai...

This paper proposes a new solution, which is a variant on the "monolothic" approach to array operations. The new solution is also not completely satisfactory, but does have advantages complementary to other proposals. It makes a class of programs easy to express, notably those involving the construction of histograms. It also allows for parallel implementations without the need to introduce non-determinism. The work reported here was motivated by discussions at the Workshop on Graph Reduction, of which this is the proceedings. In particular, it was motivated by the contributions of Arvind and Paul Hudak (see this volume), and especially Arvind's observation that the histogram problem is difficult to solve in a satisfactory way. After the first draft of this paper was written, I discovered that Simon Peyton Jones independently suggested the same idea, also prompted by one of Arvind's talks. After the second draft was written, I discovered that Guy Steele and Daniel Hillis use a very similar notion in Connection Machine Lisp [SH86]. Apparently the simple innovation described in this paper is an idea whose time has come. This paper is organized as follows. Section 1 briefly surveys previously proposed array operations. Section 2 introduces the new operation. Section 3 gives a small example of its use. Section 4 discusses two variations on the array operation. Section 5 concludes. 1 Background