Incorporating imperative features into a purely functional language has become an active area of research within the functional programming community [10, 7, 12]. One of the techniques gaining widespread acceptance as a model for imperative functional programming is monads [13, 9]. The purpose of this technical report is to give a category theoretic introduction to monads, and to explore the relationship to what functional programmers term a monad. Keywords: Monads; Category theory; Kleisli triple; Imperative functional programming. 1 Motivation This paper stems from the desire for an understanding of Moggi's work on the computational -calculus and Monads [9, 8]. The presentation here owes much to the papers of Wadler [13, 14], and the basic texts on category theory [11, 1, 4, 6, 2]. 2 Basic category theory and monads Category theory is concerned with the observation that many of the properties from algebra can be simplified by a presentation in terms of diagrams containing arrows....

It has long been known that some of the most common uses of for and while-loops in imperative programs can easily be expressed using the standard higher-order functions fold and map. With this correspondence as a starting point, we derive parallel implementations of various iterative constructs, each having a better complexity than their sequential counterparts, and explore the use of monads to guarantee the soundness of the parallel implementation. As an aid to the presentation of the material, we use the proposed syntax for parallel Haskell [27] (figure 1) as a vehicle in which imperative functional programs will be expressed. Surprisingly, incorporating imperative features into a purely functional language has become an active area of research within the functional programming community [30, 24, 36, 20]. One of the techniques gaining widespread acceptance as a model for imperative functional programming is monads [38, 37, 26]. Typically monads are used to guarantee single threadedn...