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Javier Neira

A Neighborhood of Infinity: Haskell Monoids and their Uses - 0 views

blog.sigfpe.com/...ll-monoids-and-their-uses.html

monoids haskell monads examples howto

shared by Javier Neira on 30 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The Writer MonadYou can think of monoids as being accumulators. Given a running total, n, we can add in a new value a to get a new running total n' = n `mappend` a. Accumulating totals is a very common design pattern in real code so it's useful to abstract this idea. This is exactly what the Writer monad allows. We can write monadic code that accumulates values as a "side effect". The function to perform the accumulation is (somewhat confusingly) called tell. Here's an example where we're logging a trace of what we're doing.
  • This is an implementation of the factorial function that tells us what it did.
  • We use runWriter to extract the results back out. If we run> ex1 = runWriter (fact1 10)we get back both 10! and a list of what it took to compute this.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • and the monoid for addition is Sum
  • but there is a big advantage to using the Writer version. It has type signature f :: Integer -> Writer (Sum Integer) Integer. We can immediately read from this that our function has a side effect that involves accumulating a number in a purely additive way.
  • This is the Bool type with the disjunction operator, better known as ||.
  • "tell my caller if any value of r is ever 120"
  • One last application to mention is the Data.Foldable library. This provides a generic approach to walking through a datastructure, accumulating values as we go. The foldMap function applies a function to each element of our structure and then accumulates the return values of each of these applications. An implementation of foldMap for a tree structure might be
  • Suppose we want to accumulate two side effects at the same time. For example, maybe we want to both count instructions and leave a readable trace of our computation. We could use monad transformers to combine two writer monads. But there is a slightly easier way - we can combine two monoids into one 'product' monoid. It's defined like this:instance (Monoid a,Monoid b) => Monoid (a,b) where mempty = (mempty,mempty) mappend (u,v) (w,x) = (u `mappend` w,v `mappend` x)
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