On 1/17/11 10:46 PM, C K Kashyap wrote:
Hi,
I was going through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(category_theory) -
under Formal Definition I notice that monad is a Functor T:C -> C
My question is - when we think of Maybe as a functor T:C -> C .... should we
think that C here refers to Hakell types?
Not quite. A functor is a mapping between categories.
Well, then what's a mapping between categories? It's a pair of maps, one
mapping objects to objects and the other mapping arrows to arrows, such
that they preserve the category structure (i.e., obey the functor laws).
For categories like the ones for lambda calculi, the objects are types
and the arrows are functions.
Thus, the C there is referring to some category (namely a category
modeling Haskell's type system). If you wish, you can think of
categories as being like Either Object Arrow, for a particular class of
objects and a particular class of arrows. So we'd have,
T : Either Ob Hom -> Either Ob Hom
T (Left ob) = ...
T (Right hom) = ...
Though nobody does that and we prefer our notation to slide over the
fact that functors and categories have two parts, and so we actually write:
T : C -> C
T ob = ...
T hom = ...
So we might have that T Int = Bool, or T Int = [Int], or whatever. But
we don't usually give types for the components of a functor, since we
care more about the functor as a whole (e.g., we don't give types to
individual lines of a function definition either, we only give a type
for the whole function).
As in,
(Int and Maybe Int are objects in C) and (Int -> Int and Maybe Int -> Maybe
Int are arrows in C) and T is an arrow between them. Is that right? For some
reason, I was
imagining them as two different categories C and D.
Generally speaking functors do go between different categories, but
there's no reason they can't be on the same category (e.g., the identity
functor :)
Conventional monads are always endofunctors though, since otherwise we
couldn't talk about the natural transformations like return and join (we
don't have arrows between objects in different categories). There are
some generalizations of monads that relax this however.
--
Live well,
~wren
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