Ronald Guida wrote:
From what I have read about applicative functors, they are weaker than monads because with a monad, I can use the results of a computation to select between alternative future computations and their side effects, whereas with an applicative functor, I can only select between the results of computations, while the structure of those computations and their side effects are fixed in advance.
If you are not already aware of them, you might be interested in the following two papers: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/arrows-and-idioms/arrows-and-idi... http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/arrows/arrows.pdf ("idioms" is a synonym for "applicative functors", and both papers also discuss the relation to monads.) Ciao, Janis. -- Dr. Janis Voigtlaender http://wwwtcs.inf.tu-dresden.de/~voigt/ mailto:voigt@tcs.inf.tu-dresden.de