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haskellmonadsfam-proposal

Haskell - can you have a monad that is not an applicative functor?

In this set of slides by Jim Duey at slide 13 - he suggests that all Monads are applicative functors.

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In the Haskell 7.7 compiler output - I'm seeing the following (another example is here):

‛Parser’ is an instance of Monad but not Applicative - this will become an error in GHC 7.10, under the Applicative-Monad Proposal.

Does this mean the Haskell Compiler currently tolerates Monads that are not applicative functors - but the plan is to correct this?

Solution

  • Right now Applicative isn't a superclass of Monad

    instance Monad m where ...      -- this is how it is today, instead of
instance Applicative m => Monad m where ...

    but it is planned so that in GHC 7.10 this will be changed so that Applicative is a superclass of Monad. In order to help the transition, in GHC 7.7 and 7.8 there will be the warning you saw issued whenever GHC encounters a Monad without an Applicative instance.

    Now the slightly confusing bit is that all valid Monads are applicative functors, even if they're not instances of Applicative. We can write

    fmapM :: Monad m => (a -> b) -> m a -> m b
fmapM f ma = ma >>= return . f                      -- a.k.a. `liftM`

pureM :: Monad m => a -> m a
pureM = return

ap :: Monad m => m (a -> b) -> m a -> m b
ap mf ma = do { f <- mf; a <- ma; return (f a) }    -- a.k.a. `ap`

    which together satisfy the signature and laws of Functor and Applicative. This is why the superclass constraint makes sense to add and it's purely historical accident that it wasn't there in the first case—Applicatives were discovered and popularized far after Monads were.

    newtype WrappedMonad m a = WM (m a)

instance Monad m => Functor (WrappedMonad m) where
  fmap f (WM m) = WM (liftM f m)

instance Monad m => Applicative (WrappedMonad m) where
  pure = WM . return
  WM mf <*> WM ma = WM $ mf `ap` ma

    For more information on how Applicative and Monad relate, take a look at an answer I wrote previously here: Is it better to define Functor in terms of Applicative in terms of Monad, or vice versa?