aaltman wrote:
My issues: 1. Are Haskell monads useful in a truly categorical sense? 2. Is Haskell's functor class misnamed? 3. Haskell arrows and Haskell monads have a misleading relationship
1.+2. The stumbling block is probably that Hask has exponentials and polymorphism. Hence, all morphisms and even natural transformations can/are internalized, i.e. they are objects in Haskell themselves. 2. The Functor class is for endofunctors only. 3. Arrows depart from Functor and Monad by giving rise to categories different from Hask. In other words, while morphisms and objects are both objects of Hask, the morphisms are not longer plain functions. A simple example (not of Arrows but of the "not a subcategory of Hask" phenomenon) is class Category hom where id :: hom a a (.) :: hom b c -> hom a b -> hom a c newtype Monoid m => Mon m a b = Mon m instance Monoid m => Category (Mon m) where id = Mon mempty (Mon f) . (Mon g) = Mon (f `mappend` g) Regards, apfelmus