Re: [Haskell-cafe] A question about State Monad and Monad in general

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Ketil Malde wrote:

At it's heart, monads are "just" syntactic convenience, but like many other syntactic conveniences, allows you to structure your code better. Thus it's more about programmer efficiency than program efficiency. (The "do notation" is syntactic sugar for >>= and >>).

Well, in a sense yes, but there's more to it than "do" notation -- that's just syntactic sugar. The real power is like any typeclass: algorithms (in this case sequenceM, forever, liftM, etc.) that work on all monads without having to write code for each instance. --Max