Composing Monads Using Coproducts

Composing Monads Using Coproducts (2002)

Cached

Download Links

Other Repositories/Bibliography

DBLP

by Christoph Lüth , Neil Ghani

Citations:

21 - 2 self

Versions

Version History

Metadata Version 1

Datum	Value	Source
TITLE	Composing Monads Using Coproducts	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR NAME	Christoph L Uth	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR AFFIL	FB 3--- Mathematik und Informatik	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
AUTHOR NAME	Neil Ghani	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
AUTHOR AFFIL	; Dept. Mathematics and Computer Science; University of Leicester; Categories and Subject Descriptors	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
ABSTRACT	Monads are a useful abstraction of computation, as they model diverse computational effects such as stateful computations, exceptions and I/O in a uniform manner. Their potential to provide both a modular semantics and a modular programming style was soon recognised. However, in general, monads proved difficult to compose and so research focused on special mechanisms for their composition such as distributive monads and monad transformers. We present a new approach to this problem which is general in that nearly all monads compose, mathematically elegant in using the standard categorical tools underpinning monads and computationally expressive in supporting a canonical recursion operator. In a nutshell, we propose that two monads should be composed by taking their coproduct. Although abstractly this is a simple idea, the actual construction of the coproduct of two monads is non-trivial. We outline this construction, show how to implement the coproduct within Haskell and demonstrate its usage with a few examples. We also discuss its relationship with other ways of combining monads, in particular distributive laws for monads and monad transformers.	SVM HeaderParse 0.1
CITATIONS	23 found	ParsCit 1.0