The principled objection to giving these combinators the "obvious" names in Control.Monad is that that module has historically held to a detailed convention that these proposed names unfortunately don't fit. =/

The functions in this library use the following naming conventions:

A postfix 'M' always stands for a function in the Kleisli category: The monad type constructor m is added to function results (modulo currying) and nowhere else. So, for example,

filter :: (a -> Bool) -> [a] -> [a]
filterM :: (Monad m) => (a -> m Bool) -> [a] -> m [a]
A postfix '_' changes the result type from (m a) to (m ()). Thus, for example:

sequence :: Monad m => [m a] -> m [a]
sequence_ :: Monad m => [m a] -> m ()
A prefix 'm' generalizes an existing function to a monadic form. Thus, for example:

sum :: Num a => [a] -> a
msum :: MonadPlus m => [m a] -> m a

That said, if we do adopt them, they probably should get the ifM, whenM, unlessM names.

I don't think the convention has been documented in Control.Monad itself for years.

-Edward

On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Mario Pastorelli <pastorelli.mario@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Herbert,

in general I like pattern matching but not when boolean values are involved. Your code is nice but, in my opinion, still far from the elegance of

f = unlessM (doesDirectoryExist path) $ do

putStrLn $ "Creating directory " ++ path
createDirectory path

In particular, note that I don't have to take care of the False case and the code doesn't have boilerplate.

While your solution is more general, I would like to point out that when and unless are so useful that they got their own functions in the library instead of relying on pattern matching. I consider ifM, whenM and unlessM as alternate versions of existing functions.

On 04/20/2014 09:59 PM, Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote:

Hi Mario,

On 2014-04-20 at 21:10:03 +0200, Mario Pastorelli wrote:

I would like to propose the addition of two new combinators to
Control.Monad:

ifM :: (Monad m) => m Bool -> m a -> m a -> m a
whenM :: (Monad m) => m Bool -> m () -> m ()

[...]

f = do
dirDoesntExist <- not <$> doesDirectoryExist path
when dirDoesntExist $ do
putStrLn $ "Creating directory " ++ path
createDirectory path

While I'm neutral on this proposal, I'd like to remind that LambdaCase
may be useful to avoid temporary variables as well (and is even more
useful for types other than Bool):

f = doesDirectoryExist path >>= \case
True -> return ()
False -> do
putStrLn $ "Creating directory " ++ path
createDirectory path
Cheers,
hvr

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