In denotational semantics and functional programming, the terms monad morphism, monad layering, monad constructor, and monad transformer have by now accumulated 20 years of twisted history. The exchange between Eric Kidd and sigfpe about the probability monad prompted me to investigate this history
Suppose someone stole all the monads but one, which monad would you want it to be? If you're a Haskell programmer you wouldn't be too bothered, you could just roll your own monads using nothing more than functions. But suppose someone stole do-notation leaving you with a version that only supported one type of monad. Which one would you choose? Rolling your own Haskell syntax is hard so you really want to choose wisely. Is there a universal monad that encompasses the functionality of all other monads? About a year ago I must have skimmed this post because the line "the continuation monad is in some sense the mother of all monads" became stuck in my head. So maybe Cont is the monad we should choose. This post is my investigation of why exactly it's the best choice. Along the way I'll also try to give some insight into how you can make practical use the continuation monad.
A Tutorial Implementation of a Dependently Typed Lambda Calculus Andres Löh, Conor McBride and Wouter Swierstra We present the type rules for a dependently-typed core calculus together with a straightforward implementation in Haskell. We explicitly highlight the changes necessary to shift from a simply-typed lambda calculus to the dependently-typed lambda calculus. We also describe how to extend our core language with data types and write several small example programs. The paper is accompanied by an executable interpreter and example code that allows immediate experimentation with the system we describe. Download Draft Paper (submitted to FI) Haskell source code (executable Haskell file containing all the code from the paper plus the interpreter; automatically generated from the paper sources) prelude.lp (prelude for the LambdaPi interpreter, containing several example programs) Instructions (how to get started with the LambdaPi interpreter)
``Devils and Angels'', as defined in [Friedman, 84] is an exercise in continuation programming, which you hopefully might find amusing. This is a Haskell implementation of ``Devils and Angels'' in [Friedman, 84], with a small example. You can execute it in Hugs by first loading the project P, then evaluating the example. The implementation consists of the following files: P The Hugs project file Stack.hs A stack abstraction Cont.hs Provides a continuation monad, on top of a state monad with two stacks. Devils.hs Provides the devil primitives milestone, devil, and angel Example.hs A little example
demonstrates that sprintf and sscanf can indeed use exactly the same formatting specification, which is a first-class value. We demonstrate typed sprintf and typed sscanf sharing the same formatting specification. Our solution is surprisingly trivial: it defines a simple embedded domain-specific language of formatting patterns. The functions sprintf and sscanf are two interpreters of the language, to build or parse a string according to the given pattern. Our solution relies only on GADTs. We demonstrate that lambda-abstractions at the type level are expressible already in the Hindley-Milner type system; GADT with the included polymorphic recursion help us use the abstractions.