[Haskell-cafe] [ZipList Monad] Final answer?

17 Oct 2013

      Hi,

I found a few interesting discussions on how to construct ZipList Monad in the past (around 2009). 

For example, http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-April/059079.html

But there seems no final answer to it. After a good discussion with one of my Haskell friends, we finally came up with the following one:

import Control.Monad
newtype MyZipList a = MyZipList [a] deriving (Show)

getBase :: MyZipList a -> [a]
getBase (MyZipList xs) = xs

instance Monad MyZipList where
  return x = MyZipList $ repeat x
  m >>= f  = MyZipList $ bind (getBase m) (fmap getBase f)
    where
      bind :: [a] -> (a -> [b]) -> [b]
      bind [] f     = []
      bind (x:xs) f = case f x of
                        [] -> []
                        y:_ -> y : bind xs (fmap tailOrNil f)
      tailOrNil :: [b] -> [b]
      tailOrNil []     = []
      tailOrNil (x:xs) = xs

This is fairly simple and looks to work with variable length lists. Do you think this could be the final answer?

- Etsuji

[Haskell-cafe] [ZipList Monad] Final answer?

Etsuji Nakai