Alas, I missed the discussion the first time around, and I'm afraid if I tried to raise the issue again the safety police will go through and actively remove the 'a's from the remaining useful combinators I still have. ;)

I do find it particularly obnoxious that I have to round trip through the monad transformer stack just to rip off a type argument when couldn't use if it wanted to in the first place.

Moreover, the 'void' type that actually wound up implemented doesn't help at all if you only know you have a Monad and don't have the additional Functor, (e.g. are writing a monad transformer), so even though void exists you wind up having to use 'do x <- ...; return ()' in most library code anyways.

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Oren Ben-Kiki <haskell-oren@ben-kiki.org> wrote:

I understand why the normal signature is:

when :: Monad m => Bool -> m () -> m ()

unless :: Monad m => Bool -> m () -> m ()

But why isn't there also:

when_ :: Monad m => Bool -> m a -> m ()
unless_ :: Monad m => Bool -> m a -> m ()

That is, I agree that results shouldn't be discarded "by default", but it should be easy to get rid of them if they are unneeded.

Thanks,

Oren Ben-Kiki

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