free-4.9: Monads for free

Portabilitynon-portable (fundeps, MPTCs)
Stabilityexperimental
MaintainerEdward Kmett <ekmett@gmail.com>
Safe HaskellSafe-Inferred

Control.Monad.Free.Class

Description

Monads for free.

Synopsis

Documentation

class Monad m => MonadFree f m | m -> f whereSource

Monads provide substitution (fmap) and renormalization (join):

m >>= f = join (fmap f m)

A free Monad is one that does no work during the normalization step beyond simply grafting the two monadic values together.

[] is not a free Monad (in this sense) because join [[a]] smashes the lists flat.

On the other hand, consider:

 data Tree a = Bin (Tree a) (Tree a) | Tip a
 instance Monad Tree where
   return = Tip
   Tip a >>= f = f a
   Bin l r >>= f = Bin (l >>= f) (r >>= f)

This Monad is the free Monad of Pair:

 data Pair a = Pair a a

And we could make an instance of MonadFree for it directly:

 instance MonadFree Pair Tree where
    wrap (Pair l r) = Bin l r

Or we could choose to program with Free Pair instead of Tree and thereby avoid having to define our own Monad instance.

Moreover, Control.Monad.Free.Church provides a MonadFree instance that can improve the asymptotic complexity of code that constructs free monads by effectively reassociating the use of (>>=). You may also want to take a look at the kan-extensions package (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/kan-extensions).

See Free for a more formal definition of the free Monad for a Functor.

Methods

wrap :: f (m a) -> m aSource

Add a layer.

 wrap (fmap f x) ≡ wrap (fmap return x) >>= f

Instances

(Functor f, MonadFree f m) => MonadFree f (ListT m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m) => MonadFree f (IdentityT m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m) => MonadFree f (MaybeT m) 
Functor f => MonadFree f (Free f) 
Functor f => MonadFree f (F f) 
Monad m => MonadFree Identity (IterT m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m, Error e) => MonadFree f (ErrorT e m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m, Monoid w) => MonadFree f (WriterT w m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m, Monoid w) => MonadFree f (WriterT w m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m) => MonadFree f (ContT r m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m) => MonadFree f (StateT s m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m) => MonadFree f (StateT s m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m) => MonadFree f (ReaderT e m) 
(Functor f, Monad m) => MonadFree f (FreeT f m) 
Functor f => MonadFree f (FT f m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m, Monoid w) => MonadFree f (RWST r w s m) 
(Functor f, MonadFree f m, Monoid w) => MonadFree f (RWST r w s m) 

liftF :: (Functor f, MonadFree f m) => f a -> m aSource

A version of lift that can be used with just a Functor for f.

wrapT :: (Functor f, MonadFree f m, MonadTrans t, Monad (t m)) => f (t m a) -> t m aSource

A version of wrap for monad transformers over a free monad.

Note: that this is the default implementation for wrap for MonadFree f (t m).