Abstract

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....

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