Howdy y'all!
I was reading sigfpe's Beyond Monads post
(http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/02/beyond-monads.html) about parameterized monads.
Great post, makes you go: this is so elegant and simple, why didn't I think of that?
Anyway, I was wondering whether those monads have corresponding transformers, and
if so, what they look like and what they are good for? Is there any weight to the
idea at all?
I don't know much about monad transformer theory, but I do imagine that for
transformers to be useful, they have to be stackable, so the underlying monad of a
parameterized monad also has to be a parameterized monad. I asked around in
#haskell and ski_ and I had a couple of ideas exploring the concept (although he
did most of the exploring, I just carried his luggage).
Seeing how parameterized monads are gotten by just loosening some restrictions on
normal ones and drawing then parallels between them, I think the same methodology
could be applied to transformers.
So there should be a transformer version t of a parameterized monad m and a
lifting operation plift that lifts m to t. At first I did what sigfpe did with
non-transformer monads, which was to just implement the appropriate functions for
the more general monads and see what GHCI tells us about the type. I first thought
about having a parameterized StateT, PStateT:
newtype PStateT m s1 s2 a = PStateT { runPStateT :: s1 -> m (a, s2) }
along with a lifting operation
plift :: (PMonad m) => m s1 s2 a -> t (m s1 s2) s3 s3 a
but I don't think that's cool because of the different kind of the underlying
monad. So then ski_ suggested
newtype PStateT m (s1,s1') (s2,s2') a = PStateT { runPStateT :: s1 -> m s1' s2'
(Pair a s2) }
where (s1,s1') and (s2,s2') stand for the pair of types and not a (,) type
constructor with two types applied as type parameters. That's why the pair in the
result is represented as Pair a s2. Anyway, s1' and s2' represent the category
tail and head of the underlying parameterized monad. With that, the lifting
operation would have a type of
plift :: (PMonad pm) => pm s1 s2 a -> t pm (s, s1) (s, s2) a
basically I'm just wondering how you guys think the transformer versions of
parameterized monads work and what their types should be. And if you think they're
feasible at all. So basically just talk about parameterized monad transformers here :]
Cheerio!
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