Control.Applicative.Lift

There's a family of functions in Control.Applicative which follow the pattern liftA2, liftA3, etc. Using some tricks from Richard Eisenberg's thesis we can write them all at once.

• Eisenberg, Richard A. "Dependent Types in Haskell: Theory and Practice." University of Pennsylvania, 2016. https://github.com/goldfirere/thesis/raw/master/built/thesis.pdf

This module exports the one lift function; for the internal implementation details see Control.Applicative.Lift.Internal.

Documentation

lift :: (Applyable b n, Applicative f) => (a -> b) -> f a -> AppFunc f n b

Lift a function over applicative arguments. This function is an arity-generic version of the functions liftA2, liftA3, etc.

Type inference works best when the function being lifted is monomorphic:

>>> lift (\x y z -> x ++ y ++ z) (Just "a") (Just "b") (Just "c")
Just "abc"

In these cases, GHC can see the number of arguments the function must have, and so is able to pick the correct instance for Applyable.

If the function is not monomorphic (for instance +), you will need to give a type signature:

>>> lift ((+) :: Int -> Int -> Int) (Just 1) (Just 2)
Just 3

Alternatively, you can use type applications to monomorphise the function:

>>> :set -XTypeApplications
>>> lift ((+) @Int) (Just 1) (Just 2)
Just 3

Finally, everything is aggressively inlined, so there should be no cost to using this function over manually writing liftA3 etc.