Re: [Haskell-cafe] Abuse of the monad

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"Thomas" == Thomas Davie writes:

Thomas> On 12 Mar 2009, at 15:16, Andrew Wagner wrote:

Can you expand on this a bit? I'm curious why you think this.

Thomas> For two reasons: Thomas> Firstly, I often find that people use the Monadic Thomas> interface when one of the less powerful ones is both Thomas> powerful enough and more convenient, parsec is a wonderful Thomas> example of this. When the applicative instance is used Thomas> instead of the monadic one, programs rapidly become more Thomas> readable, because they stop describing the order in which Thomas> things should be parsed, and start describing the grammar Thomas> of the language being parsed instead. That's interesting. I recently used parsec 3. I wrote using the monadic interface because I could understand (just about) how to do so. I was looking at the examples in RWH, and I could follow the explanation of the monadic interface much easier. Perhaps this was because RWH shows how to write using the monadic interface, and then shows how to convert this to the applicative interface. It's hard to follow a tutorial that shows you how to convert from something you aren't starting with. -- Colin Adams Preston Lancashire