On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 1:29 AM, Ryan Ingram
Of course, the point of this message isn't just to complain. The overlap implementation was abhorrent and it *is* better now than it was before. But perhaps there is an abstraction we are missing that would allow for better interoperability. For example, the type-compose library documentation at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/TypeCompose mentions that (f :. g) is an applicative functor if both f and g are applicative functors, which means there is a generic "transformer" for all applicative functors! The presense of >>=/join for monads make this more difficult, although there is the "product" definition:
newtype Product m n a = Prod { runProd :: m (Either a (Product n m a)) }
which handles nesting joins by just nesting the monads recursively. But in this case it is up to the user to figure out how to untangle the spaghetti created, so that's no good.
So, does anyone have any good ideas for improving the interoperability of MTL?
http://sneezy.cs.nott.ac.uk/fplunch/weblog/?p=111 This was on planet haskell a little over a month ago. It describes how any monad whose operations look like f (m a) -> m a for some functor f can be automatically lifted. If it's possible to phrase a basis for operations on some transformer this way and then provide "adapters" for ease of use, that would be one excellent way to improve interoperability. Some caveats are mentioned in the post... Luke