On 7/14/07, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin wrote:

> That is my recollection also. (Don't ask me *which* monads, mind you...)
In the case in point, the law breakage never the less matches
"intuition"; personally, I ignore the monad laws on the basis that if
you're doing something "sane", the laws will automatically hold anyway.
(But maybe I'm just a renegade?)

Yeah, the laws confused me for a while as well.  Hint to guys writing Haskell documentation, we're not all doing CS phD you know ;-)  We just want to get things done ;-)

Andrew, I found comfort and explanation in this article http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Monads_as_containers :

"The functions return and bind need to satisfy a few laws in order to make a monad, but if you define them in a sensible way given what they are supposed to do, the laws will work out. The laws are only a formal way to give the informal description of the meanings of return and bind I have here."