Monad transformer
In functional programming, a monad transformer is a type constructor which takes a monad as an argument and returns a monad as a result.
Monad transformers can be used to compose features encapsulated by monads – such as state, exception handling, and I/O – in a modular way. Typically, a monad transformer is created by generalising an existing monad; applying the resulting monad transformer to the identity monad yields a monad which is equivalent to the original monad (ignoring any necessary boxing and unboxing).
Definition
A monad transformer consists of:
- A type constructor
t
of kind(* -> *) -> * -> *
- Monad operations
return
andbind
(or an equivalent formulation) for allt m
wherem
is a monad, satisfying the monad laws - An additional operation,
lift :: m a -> t m a
, satisfying the following laws:[1] (the notation`bind`
below indicates infix application):lift . return = return
lift (m `bind` k) = (lift m) `bind` (lift . k)
Examples
The option monad transformer
Given any monad , the option monad transformer (where denotes the option type) is defined by:
The exception monad transformer
Given any monad , the exception monad transformer (where E is the type of exceptions) is defined by:
The reader monad transformer
Given any monad , the reader monad transformer (where E is the environment type) is defined by:
The state monad transformer
Given any monad , the state monad transformer (where S is the state type) is defined by:
The writer monad transformer
Given any monad , the writer monad transformer (where W is endowed with a monoid operation ∗ with identity element ) is defined by:
The continuation monad transformer
Given any monad , the continuation monad transformer maps an arbitrary type R into functions of type , where R is the result type of the continuation. It is defined by:
Note that monad transformations are usually not commutative: for instance, applying the state transformer to the option monad yields a type (a computation which may fail and yield no final state), whereas the converse transformation has type (a computation which yields a final state and an optional return value).
See also
References
- Liang, Sheng; Hudak, Paul; Jones, Mark (1995). "Monad transformers and modular interpreters" (PDF). Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages. New York, NY: ACM. pp. 333–343. doi:10.1145/199448.199528.