Related
I was working on creating my own custom mutable/frozen data type that internally contains an MVector/Vector. It needs to be mutable for performance reasons so switching to an immutable data structure is not something I am considering.
It seems like implementing an observer function for one of the two versions should allow me to just steal that implementation for the other type. Here are the two options I am considering:
render :: Show a => MCustom s a -> ST s String
render mc = ...non trivial implementation...
show :: Show a => Custom a -> a
show c = runST $ render =<< unsafeThaw c
Where unsafeThaw calls Vector.unsafeThaw under the covers, which should be safe as that thawed vector is never mutated, only read. This approach feels the cleanest, the only downside is that render is strict, which forces show to be strict whereas a duplicate implementation could correctly stream the String without forcing it all at once.
The other option, which feels much more dirty but that I think is safe is to do this:
show :: Show a => Custom a -> a
show c = ...non trivial implementation that allows lazy streaming...
render :: Show a => MCustom s a -> ST s String
render mc = do
s <- show <$> unsafeFreeze mc
s `deepseq` pure s
Are either of these my best option? If not what else should I do?
To me it seemed most intuitive to build one version off of the other. But it seems like if I make the mutable version the base version then I will end up with a lot more strictness then I want, even if the implementations seem fairly clean and logical, just because ST necessitates strictness unless I throw in some unsafeInterleaveST calls, but these would only be safe when the mutable observer was called via an immutable object.
On the other hand if I make the immutable version the base version then I will end up with more dirty, deepseq code, and sometimes I would just have to reimplement things. For example all in place editing functions can be done on a frozen object pretty easily by just copying the frozen object and then calling unsafeThaw on it and modifying the copy in place before calling unsafeFreeze and returning it. But doing the opposite isn't really doable, as a copy modification that is used for the immutable version cannot be converted to an in place modification.
Should I perhaps write all modification functions alongside the mutable implementation, and all observer functions alongside the immutable implementation. And then have a file that depends on both that unifies everything via unsafeThaw and unsafeFreeze?
How about having a pure function
show :: (StringLike s, Show a) => Custom a -> s
You can get both lazy and strict output with different instantiations of s, in which cons is either lazy or strict; e.g. String or Text:
class StringLike s where
cons :: Char -> s -> s
nil :: s
uncons :: s -> Maybe (Char, s)
instance StringLike String where ...
instance StringLike Text where ...
You could use other methods, e.g. phantom types, or simply having two functions (showString and showText), to distinguish between lazy and strict output if you like. But if you look at types as specifications of a function's semantics, then the place to indicate laziness or strictness is in the return type of that operation. This removes the need for some sort of strict show for Custom inside of ST.
For the MCustom version, you probably do not export the String version, e.g:
render :: MCustom s a -> ST s Text
render a = show <$> unsafeFreeze a
You can throw in a seq to force the result when the function runs but the entire Text would be forced when any character is used anyways.
But the simplest solution seems to just abstract the pattern of using a mutable structure in an immutable fashion, e.g.
atomically :: (NFData a) => (Custom x -> a) -> MCustom s x -> ST s a
atomically f v = do
r <- f <$> unsafeFreeze v
r `deepseq` pure r
This saves you from using unsafeFreeze/deepseq all over your code, just as you have modify to do immutable operations on mutable vectors.
In my humble opinion the answers to the famous question "What is a monad?", especially the most voted ones, try to explain what is a monad without clearly explaining why monads are really necessary. Can they be explained as the solution to a problem?
Why do we need monads?
We want to program only using functions. ("functional programming (FP)" after all).
Then, we have a first big problem. This is a program:
f(x) = 2 * x
g(x,y) = x / y
How can we say what is to be executed first? How can we form an ordered sequence of functions (i.e. a program) using no more than functions?
Solution: compose functions. If you want first g and then f, just write f(g(x,y)). This way, "the program" is a function as well: main = f(g(x,y)). OK, but ...
More problems: some functions might fail (i.e. g(2,0), divide by 0). We have no "exceptions" in FP (an exception is not a function). How do we solve it?
Solution: Let's allow functions to return two kind of things: instead of having g : Real,Real -> Real (function from two reals into a real), let's allow g : Real,Real -> Real | Nothing (function from two reals into (real or nothing)).
But functions should (to be simpler) return only one thing.
Solution: let's create a new type of data to be returned, a "boxing type" that encloses maybe a real or be simply nothing. Hence, we can have g : Real,Real -> Maybe Real. OK, but ...
What happens now to f(g(x,y))? f is not ready to consume a Maybe Real. And, we don't want to change every function we could connect with g to consume a Maybe Real.
Solution: let's have a special function to "connect"/"compose"/"link" functions. That way, we can, behind the scenes, adapt the output of one function to feed the following one.
In our case: g >>= f (connect/compose g to f). We want >>= to get g's output, inspect it and, in case it is Nothing just don't call f and return Nothing; or on the contrary, extract the boxed Real and feed f with it. (This algorithm is just the implementation of >>= for the Maybe type). Also note that >>= must be written only once per "boxing type" (different box, different adapting algorithm).
Many other problems arise which can be solved using this same pattern: 1. Use a "box" to codify/store different meanings/values, and have functions like g that return those "boxed values". 2. Have a composer/linker g >>= f to help connecting g's output to f's input, so we don't have to change any f at all.
Remarkable problems that can be solved using this technique are:
having a global state that every function in the sequence of functions ("the program") can share: solution StateMonad.
We don't like "impure functions": functions that yield different output for same input. Therefore, let's mark those functions, making them to return a tagged/boxed value: IO monad.
Total happiness!
The answer is, of course, "We don't". As with all abstractions, it isn't necessary.
Haskell does not need a monad abstraction. It isn't necessary for performing IO in a pure language. The IO type takes care of that just fine by itself. The existing monadic desugaring of do blocks could be replaced with desugaring to bindIO, returnIO, and failIO as defined in the GHC.Base module. (It's not a documented module on hackage, so I'll have to point at its source for documentation.) So no, there's no need for the monad abstraction.
So if it's not needed, why does it exist? Because it was found that many patterns of computation form monadic structures. Abstraction of a structure allows for writing code that works across all instances of that structure. To put it more concisely - code reuse.
In functional languages, the most powerful tool found for code reuse has been composition of functions. The good old (.) :: (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> (a -> c) operator is exceedingly powerful. It makes it easy to write tiny functions and glue them together with minimal syntactic or semantic overhead.
But there are cases when the types don't work out quite right. What do you do when you have foo :: (b -> Maybe c) and bar :: (a -> Maybe b)? foo . bar doesn't typecheck, because b and Maybe b aren't the same type.
But... it's almost right. You just want a bit of leeway. You want to be able to treat Maybe b as if it were basically b. It's a poor idea to just flat-out treat them as the same type, though. That's more or less the same thing as null pointers, which Tony Hoare famously called the billion-dollar mistake. So if you can't treat them as the same type, maybe you can find a way to extend the composition mechanism (.) provides.
In that case, it's important to really examine the theory underlying (.). Fortunately, someone has already done this for us. It turns out that the combination of (.) and id form a mathematical construct known as a category. But there are other ways to form categories. A Kleisli category, for instance, allows the objects being composed to be augmented a bit. A Kleisli category for Maybe would consist of (.) :: (b -> Maybe c) -> (a -> Maybe b) -> (a -> Maybe c) and id :: a -> Maybe a. That is, the objects in the category augment the (->) with a Maybe, so (a -> b) becomes (a -> Maybe b).
And suddenly, we've extended the power of composition to things that the traditional (.) operation doesn't work on. This is a source of new abstraction power. Kleisli categories work with more types than just Maybe. They work with every type that can assemble a proper category, obeying the category laws.
Left identity: id . f = f
Right identity: f . id = f
Associativity: f . (g . h) = (f . g) . h
As long as you can prove that your type obeys those three laws, you can turn it into a Kleisli category. And what's the big deal about that? Well, it turns out that monads are exactly the same thing as Kleisli categories. Monad's return is the same as Kleisli id. Monad's (>>=) isn't identical to Kleisli (.), but it turns out to be very easy to write each in terms of the other. And the category laws are the same as the monad laws, when you translate them across the difference between (>>=) and (.).
So why go through all this bother? Why have a Monad abstraction in the language? As I alluded to above, it enables code reuse. It even enables code reuse along two different dimensions.
The first dimension of code reuse comes directly from the presence of the abstraction. You can write code that works across all instances of the abstraction. There's the entire monad-loops package consisting of loops that work with any instance of Monad.
The second dimension is indirect, but it follows from the existence of composition. When composition is easy, it's natural to write code in small, reusable chunks. This is the same way having the (.) operator for functions encourages writing small, reusable functions.
So why does the abstraction exist? Because it's proven to be a tool that enables more composition in code, resulting in creating reusable code and encouraging the creation of more reusable code. Code reuse is one of the holy grails of programming. The monad abstraction exists because it moves us a little bit towards that holy grail.
Benjamin Pierce said in TAPL
A type system can be regarded as calculating a kind of static
approximation to the run-time behaviours of the terms in a program.
That's why a language equipped with a powerful type system is strictly more expressive, than a poorly typed language. You can think about monads in the same way.
As #Carl and sigfpe point, you can equip a datatype with all operations you want without resorting to monads, typeclasses or whatever other abstract stuff. However monads allow you not only to write reusable code, but also to abstract away all redundant detailes.
As an example, let's say we want to filter a list. The simplest way is to use the filter function: filter (> 3) [1..10], which equals [4,5,6,7,8,9,10].
A slightly more complicated version of filter, that also passes an accumulator from left to right, is
swap (x, y) = (y, x)
(.*) = (.) . (.)
filterAccum :: (a -> b -> (Bool, a)) -> a -> [b] -> [b]
filterAccum f a xs = [x | (x, True) <- zip xs $ snd $ mapAccumL (swap .* f) a xs]
To get all i, such that i <= 10, sum [1..i] > 4, sum [1..i] < 25, we can write
filterAccum (\a x -> let a' = a + x in (a' > 4 && a' < 25, a')) 0 [1..10]
which equals [3,4,5,6].
Or we can redefine the nub function, that removes duplicate elements from a list, in terms of filterAccum:
nub' = filterAccum (\a x -> (x `notElem` a, x:a)) []
nub' [1,2,4,5,4,3,1,8,9,4] equals [1,2,4,5,3,8,9]. A list is passed as an accumulator here. The code works, because it's possible to leave the list monad, so the whole computation stays pure (notElem doesn't use >>= actually, but it could). However it's not possible to safely leave the IO monad (i.e. you cannot execute an IO action and return a pure value — the value always will be wrapped in the IO monad). Another example is mutable arrays: after you have leaved the ST monad, where a mutable array live, you cannot update the array in constant time anymore. So we need a monadic filtering from the Control.Monad module:
filterM :: (Monad m) => (a -> m Bool) -> [a] -> m [a]
filterM _ [] = return []
filterM p (x:xs) = do
flg <- p x
ys <- filterM p xs
return (if flg then x:ys else ys)
filterM executes a monadic action for all elements from a list, yielding elements, for which the monadic action returns True.
A filtering example with an array:
nub' xs = runST $ do
arr <- newArray (1, 9) True :: ST s (STUArray s Int Bool)
let p i = readArray arr i <* writeArray arr i False
filterM p xs
main = print $ nub' [1,2,4,5,4,3,1,8,9,4]
prints [1,2,4,5,3,8,9] as expected.
And a version with the IO monad, which asks what elements to return:
main = filterM p [1,2,4,5] >>= print where
p i = putStrLn ("return " ++ show i ++ "?") *> readLn
E.g.
return 1? -- output
True -- input
return 2?
False
return 4?
False
return 5?
True
[1,5] -- output
And as a final illustration, filterAccum can be defined in terms of filterM:
filterAccum f a xs = evalState (filterM (state . flip f) xs) a
with the StateT monad, that is used under the hood, being just an ordinary datatype.
This example illustrates, that monads not only allow you to abstract computational context and write clean reusable code (due to the composability of monads, as #Carl explains), but also to treat user-defined datatypes and built-in primitives uniformly.
I don't think IO should be seen as a particularly outstanding monad, but it's certainly one of the more astounding ones for beginners, so I'll use it for my explanation.
Naïvely building an IO system for Haskell
The simplest conceivable IO system for a purely-functional language (and in fact the one Haskell started out with) is this:
main₀ :: String -> String
main₀ _ = "Hello World"
With lazyness, that simple signature is enough to actually build interactive terminal programs – very limited, though. Most frustrating is that we can only output text. What if we added some more exciting output possibilities?
data Output = TxtOutput String
| Beep Frequency
main₁ :: String -> [Output]
main₁ _ = [ TxtOutput "Hello World"
-- , Beep 440 -- for debugging
]
cute, but of course a much more realistic “alterative output” would be writing to a file. But then you'd also want some way to read from files. Any chance?
Well, when we take our main₁ program and simply pipe a file to the process (using operating system facilities), we have essentially implemented file-reading. If we could trigger that file-reading from within the Haskell language...
readFile :: Filepath -> (String -> [Output]) -> [Output]
This would use an “interactive program” String->[Output], feed it a string obtained from a file, and yield a non-interactive program that simply executes the given one.
There's one problem here: we don't really have a notion of when the file is read. The [Output] list sure gives a nice order to the outputs, but we don't get an order for when the inputs will be done.
Solution: make input-events also items in the list of things to do.
data IO₀ = TxtOut String
| TxtIn (String -> [Output])
| FileWrite FilePath String
| FileRead FilePath (String -> [Output])
| Beep Double
main₂ :: String -> [IO₀]
main₂ _ = [ FileRead "/dev/null" $ \_ ->
[TxtOutput "Hello World"]
]
Ok, now you may spot an imbalance: you can read a file and make output dependent on it, but you can't use the file contents to decide to e.g. also read another file. Obvious solution: make the result of the input-events also something of type IO, not just Output. That sure includes simple text output, but also allows reading additional files etc..
data IO₁ = TxtOut String
| TxtIn (String -> [IO₁])
| FileWrite FilePath String
| FileRead FilePath (String -> [IO₁])
| Beep Double
main₃ :: String -> [IO₁]
main₃ _ = [ TxtIn $ \_ ->
[TxtOut "Hello World"]
]
That would now actually allow you to express any file operation you might want in a program (though perhaps not with good performance), but it's somewhat overcomplicated:
main₃ yields a whole list of actions. Why don't we simply use the signature :: IO₁, which has this as a special case?
The lists don't really give a reliable overview of program flow anymore: most subsequent computations will only be “announced” as the result of some input operation. So we might as well ditch the list structure, and simply cons a “and then do” to each output operation.
data IO₂ = TxtOut String IO₂
| TxtIn (String -> IO₂)
| Terminate
main₄ :: IO₂
main₄ = TxtIn $ \_ ->
TxtOut "Hello World"
Terminate
Not too bad!
So what has all of this to do with monads?
In practice, you wouldn't want to use plain constructors to define all your programs. There would need to be a good couple of such fundamental constructors, yet for most higher-level stuff we would like to write a function with some nice high-level signature. It turns out most of these would look quite similar: accept some kind of meaningfully-typed value, and yield an IO action as the result.
getTime :: (UTCTime -> IO₂) -> IO₂
randomRIO :: Random r => (r,r) -> (r -> IO₂) -> IO₂
findFile :: RegEx -> (Maybe FilePath -> IO₂) -> IO₂
There's evidently a pattern here, and we'd better write it as
type IO₃ a = (a -> IO₂) -> IO₂ -- If this reminds you of continuation-passing
-- style, you're right.
getTime :: IO₃ UTCTime
randomRIO :: Random r => (r,r) -> IO₃ r
findFile :: RegEx -> IO₃ (Maybe FilePath)
Now that starts to look familiar, but we're still only dealing with thinly-disguised plain functions under the hood, and that's risky: each “value-action” has the responsibility of actually passing on the resulting action of any contained function (else the control flow of the entire program is easily disrupted by one ill-behaved action in the middle). We'd better make that requirement explicit. Well, it turns out those are the monad laws, though I'm not sure we can really formulate them without the standard bind/join operators.
At any rate, we've now reached a formulation of IO that has a proper monad instance:
data IO₄ a = TxtOut String (IO₄ a)
| TxtIn (String -> IO₄ a)
| TerminateWith a
txtOut :: String -> IO₄ ()
txtOut s = TxtOut s $ TerminateWith ()
txtIn :: IO₄ String
txtIn = TxtIn $ TerminateWith
instance Functor IO₄ where
fmap f (TerminateWith a) = TerminateWith $ f a
fmap f (TxtIn g) = TxtIn $ fmap f . g
fmap f (TxtOut s c) = TxtOut s $ fmap f c
instance Applicative IO₄ where
pure = TerminateWith
(<*>) = ap
instance Monad IO₄ where
TerminateWith x >>= f = f x
TxtOut s c >>= f = TxtOut s $ c >>= f
TxtIn g >>= f = TxtIn $ (>>=f) . g
Obviously this is not an efficient implementation of IO, but it's in principle usable.
Monads serve basically to compose functions together in a chain. Period.
Now the way they compose differs across the existing monads, thus resulting in different behaviors (e.g., to simulate mutable state in the state monad).
The confusion about monads is that being so general, i.e., a mechanism to compose functions, they can be used for many things, thus leading people to believe that monads are about state, about IO, etc, when they are only about "composing functions".
Now, one interesting thing about monads, is that the result of the composition is always of type "M a", that is, a value inside an envelope tagged with "M". This feature happens to be really nice to implement, for example, a clear separation between pure from impure code: declare all impure actions as functions of type "IO a" and provide no function, when defining the IO monad, to take out the "a" value from inside the "IO a". The result is that no function can be pure and at the same time take out a value from an "IO a", because there is no way to take such value while staying pure (the function must be inside the "IO" monad to use such value). (NOTE: well, nothing is perfect, so the "IO straitjacket" can be broken using "unsafePerformIO : IO a -> a" thus polluting what was supposed to be a pure function, but this should be used very sparingly and when you really know to be not introducing any impure code with side-effects.
Monads are just a convenient framework for solving a class of recurring problems. First, monads must be functors (i.e. must support mapping without looking at the elements (or their type)), they must also bring a binding (or chaining) operation and a way to create a monadic value from an element type (return). Finally, bind and return must satisfy two equations (left and right identities), also called the monad laws. (Alternatively one could define monads to have a flattening operation instead of binding.)
The list monad is commonly used to deal with non-determinism. The bind operation selects one element of the list (intuitively all of them in parallel worlds), lets the programmer to do some computation with them, and then combines the results in all worlds to single list (by concatenating, or flattening, a nested list). Here is how one would define a permutation function in the monadic framework of Haskell:
perm [e] = [[e]]
perm l = do (leader, index) <- zip l [0 :: Int ..]
let shortened = take index l ++ drop (index + 1) l
trailer <- perm shortened
return (leader : trailer)
Here is an example repl session:
*Main> perm "a"
["a"]
*Main> perm "ab"
["ab","ba"]
*Main> perm ""
[]
*Main> perm "abc"
["abc","acb","bac","bca","cab","cba"]
It should be noted that the list monad is in no way a side effecting computation. A mathematical structure being a monad (i.e. conforming to the above mentioned interfaces and laws) does not imply side effects, though side-effecting phenomena often nicely fit into the monadic framework.
You need monads if you have a type constructor and functions that returns values of that type family. Eventually, you would like to combine these kind of functions together. These are the three key elements to answer why.
Let me elaborate. You have Int, String and Real and functions of type Int -> String, String -> Real and so on. You can combine these functions easily, ending with Int -> Real. Life is good.
Then, one day, you need to create a new family of types. It could be because you need to consider the possibility of returning no value (Maybe), returning an error (Either), multiple results (List) and so on.
Notice that Maybe is a type constructor. It takes a type, like Int and returns a new type Maybe Int. First thing to remember, no type constructor, no monad.
Of course, you want to use your type constructor in your code, and soon you end with functions like Int -> Maybe String and String -> Maybe Float. Now, you can't easily combine your functions. Life is not good anymore.
And here's when monads come to the rescue. They allow you to combine that kind of functions again. You just need to change the composition . for >==.
Why do we need monadic types?
Since it was the quandary of I/O and its observable effects in nonstrict languages like Haskell that brought the monadic interface to such prominence:
[...] monads are used to address the more general problem of computations (involving state, input/output, backtracking, ...) returning values: they do not solve any input/output-problems directly but rather provide an elegant and flexible abstraction of many solutions to related problems. [...] For instance, no less than three different input/output-schemes are used to solve these basic problems in Imperative functional programming, the paper which originally proposed `a new model, based on monads, for performing input/output in a non-strict, purely functional language'. [...]
[Such] input/output-schemes merely provide frameworks in which side-effecting operations can safely be used with a guaranteed order of execution and without affecting the properties of the purely functional parts of the language.
Claus Reinke (pages 96-97 of 210).
(emphasis by me.)
[...] When we write effectful code – monads or no monads – we have to constantly keep in mind the context of expressions we pass around.
The fact that monadic code ‘desugars’ (is implementable in terms of) side-effect-free code is irrelevant. When we use monadic notation, we program within that notation – without considering what this notation desugars into. Thinking of the desugared code breaks the monadic abstraction. A side-effect-free, applicative code is normally compiled to (that is, desugars into) C or machine code. If the desugaring argument has any force, it may be applied just as well to the applicative code, leading to the conclusion that it all boils down to the machine code and hence all programming is imperative.
[...] From the personal experience, I have noticed that the mistakes I make when writing monadic code are exactly the mistakes I made when programming in C. Actually, monadic mistakes tend to be worse, because monadic notation (compared to that of a typical imperative language) is ungainly and obscuring.
Oleg Kiselyov (page 21 of 26).
The most difficult construct for students to understand is the monad. I introduce IO without mentioning monads.
Olaf Chitil.
More generally:
Still, today, over 25 years after the introduction of the concept of monads to the world of functional programming, beginning functional programmers struggle to grasp the concept of monads. This struggle is exemplified by the numerous blog posts about the effort of trying to learn about monads. From our own experience we notice that even at university level, bachelor level students often struggle to comprehend monads and consistently score poorly on monad-related exam questions.
Considering that the concept of monads is not likely to disappear from the functional programming landscape any time soon, it is vital that we, as the functional programming community, somehow overcome the problems novices encounter when first studying monads.
Tim Steenvoorden, Jurriën Stutterheim, Erik Barendsen and Rinus Plasmeijer.
If only there was another way to specify "a guaranteed order of execution" in Haskell, while keeping the ability to separate regular Haskell definitions from those involved in I/O (and its observable effects) - translating this variation of Philip Wadler's echo:
val echoML : unit -> unit
fun echoML () = let val c = getcML () in
if c = #"\n" then
()
else
let val _ = putcML c in
echoML ()
end
fun putcML c = TextIO.output1(TextIO.stdOut,c);
fun getcML () = valOf(TextIO.input1(TextIO.stdIn));
...could then be as simple as:
echo :: OI -> ()
echo u = let !(u1:u2:u3:_) = partsOI u in
let !c = getChar u1 in
if c == '\n' then
()
else
let !_ = putChar c u2 in
echo u3
where:
data OI -- abstract
foreign import ccall "primPartOI" partOI :: OI -> (OI, OI)
⋮
foreign import ccall "primGetCharOI" getChar :: OI -> Char
foreign import ccall "primPutCharOI" putChar :: Char -> OI -> ()
⋮
and:
partsOI :: OI -> [OI]
partsOI u = let !(u1, u2) = partOI u in u1 : partsOI u2
How would this work? At run-time, Main.main receives an initial OI pseudo-data value as an argument:
module Main(main) where
main :: OI -> ()
⋮
...from which other OI values are produced, using partOI or partsOI. All you have to do is ensure each new OI value is used at most once, in each call to an OI-based definition, foreign or otherwise. In return, you get back a plain ordinary result - it isn't e.g. paired with some odd abstract state, or requires the use of a callback continuation, etc.
Using OI, instead of the unit type () like Standard ML does, means we can avoid always having to use the monadic interface:
Once you're in the IO monad, you're stuck there forever, and are reduced to Algol-style imperative programming.
Robert Harper.
But if you really do need it:
type IO a = OI -> a
unitIO :: a -> IO a
unitIO x = \ u -> let !_ = partOI u in x
bindIO :: IO a -> (a -> IO b) -> IO b
bindIO m k = \ u -> let !(u1, u2) = partOI u in
let !x = m u1 in
let !y = k x u2 in
y
⋮
So, monadic types aren't always needed - there are other interfaces out there:
LML had a fully fledged implementation of oracles running of a multi-processor (a Sequent Symmetry) back in ca 1989. The description in the Fudgets thesis refers to this implementation. It was fairly pleasant to work with and quite practical.
[...]
These days everything is done with monads so other solutions are sometimes forgotten.
Lennart Augustsson (2006).
Wait a moment: since it so closely resembles Standard ML's direct use of effects, is this approach and its use of pseudo-data referentially transparent?
Absolutely - just find a suitable definition of "referential transparency"; there's plenty to choose from...
Is there a way to unit test networks created in reactive banana? Say I've built up some network with some input events - is it possible to verify that events have produced some output stream/behaviours have some value after some number of input events. Does it even make sense to do this?
I noticed there are various interpret* functions but couldn't seem to work out how to use them. There's also the Model module which looks ideal for testing but has completely different types to the real implementation.
When you say "unit test," I'm imagining something like QuickCheck, where you inject a number of inputs into the network and examine the outputs. To do such a thing, we'd need a function along the lines of:
evalNetwork :: Network a b -> [a] -> IO [b]
Near the end of this answer I demonstrate a variant on one of the interpret* functions that has a similar type, for a specific type of "network."
Mumbo-jumbo about reactive-banana network types
Such a function is incompatible with the actual type of "entire networks" used in reactive-banana. Contrast the type of the actual function involving networks:
compile :: (forall t. Frameworks t => Moment t ()) -> IO EventNetwork
So the type of any network is forall t. Frameworks t => Moment t (). There are no type variables; no inputs or outputs. Similarly, the EventNetwork type has no parameters. That tells us that all of the input and output is handled via side-effects in IO. It also means there can't really be a function like
interpret? :: EventNetwork -> [a] -> IO [b]
because what would a and b be?
This is an important aspect of the design of reactive-banana. It makes writing bindings to an imperative GUI framework easy, for instance. The magic of reactive-banana is to shuffle around all the side-effects into, as the docs call it, "a single, huge callback function."
Furthermore, it's typical for the event network to be intimately associated with the GUI itself. Consider the Arithmetic example, where bInput1 and bInput2 are both built using the actual input widgets, and the output is bound to output, another widget.
It would be possible to build a testing harness using "mocking" techniques as in other languages. You could substitute out the actual GUI bindings with bindings to something like pipes-concurrency. I haven't heard of anybody doing so.
How to unit test: Abstract out the logic
Better, you can and should write as much of your program logic as possible in separate functions. If you have two inputs, of types inA and inB, and one output of type out, perhaps you can write a function like
logic :: Event t inA -> Event t inB -> Behavior t out
This is almost the right type to use with interpretFrameworks:
interpretFrameworks :: (forall t. Event t a -> Event t b) ->
[a] -> IO [[b]]
You can combine the two input Events using split (or rather, split the input into the two Events required by logic). Now you'd have logic' :: Event t (Either inA inB) -> Behavior t out.
You're kind of stymied converting the output Behavior to an Event. In version 0.7, the changes function in Reactive.Banana.Frameworks had type Frameworks t => Behavior t a -> Moment t (Event t a), which you could have used to unwrap the Behavior, although you'd have to do it in the Moment monad. In version 0.8, however, the a is wrapped up as a Future a, where Future is an unexported type. (There's an issue on Github re exporting Future.)
The easiest way to unwrap the Behavior is probably just to reimplement interpretFrameworks with the appropriate type. (Note that it returns a tuple containing the initial value and the list of subsequent values.) Even though Future is not exported, you can use its Functor instance:
interpretFrameworks' :: (forall t. Event t a -> Behavior t b)
-> [a] -> IO (b, [[b]])
interpretFrameworks' f xs = do
output <- newIORef []
init <- newIORef undefined
(addHandler, runHandlers) <- newAddHandler
network <- compile $ do
e <- fromAddHandler addHandler
o <- changes $ f e
i <- initial $ f e
liftIO $ writeIORef init i
reactimate' $ (fmap . fmap) (\b -> modifyIORef output (++[b])) o
actuate network
bs <- forM xs $ \x -> do
runHandlers x
bs <- readIORef output
writeIORef output []
return bs
i <- readIORef init
return (i, bs)
This should do the trick.
Comparison with other FRP frameworks
Contrast this with other frameworks like Gabriel Gonzalez's mvc or Ertugrul Söylemez's netwire. mvc requires you to write your program logic as a stateful but otherwise-pure Pipe a b (State s) (), and netwire networks have type Wire s e m a b; in both cases the types a and b expose the input to and output from your network. This gets you easy testing, but precludes the "inline" GUI bindings available with reactive-banana. It's a tradeoff.
Just learning about State monad from this excellent tutorial. However, when I tried to explain it to a non-programmer they had a question that stumped me.
If the purpose of the State is to simulate mutable memory, why is the function that state monad stores is of the type:
s -> (a, s)
and not simply:
s -> s
In other words, what is the need for the "intermediate" value? For example, couldn't we, in the cases where we need it, simulate it by simply defining a state as a tuple of (state, value)?
I'm sure I confused something, any help is appreciated.
To draw a parallel with an imperative language like C, s -> s corresponds to a function with the return type void, which is invoked purely for side effects (such as mutating the memory). It is isomorphic to State s ().
And indeed, it is possible to write C functions which communicate only through global variables. But, as in C, it is often convenient to return values from functions. That's what a is for.
Of course it's possible that for your particular problem s -> s is a better choice. Although it's not a Monad, it is a Monoid (when wrapped in Endo). So you can construct such functions using <> and mempty, which correspond to >>= and return of Monad.
To expand a bit on Nick's answer:
s is the state. If all your functions were s -> s (state to state), your functions would not be able to return any values. You could define your state as (the actual state, value returned), but that conflates the state with the value the state-ful functions are computing. And it's also the common case that you'll want functions to actually compute and return values...
s' -> s' is equivalent to (a, s) -> (a, s). Here it is obvious that your State will need an initial a to start things off in addition to s.
On the other hand s -> (a, s) only needs the seed s to begin things and does not require an a value at all.
Thus the type of s -> (a, s) tells you that State is less complex than if it were (a, s) -> (a, s). Types in Haskell convey LOTS of information.
If the purpose of the State is to simulate mutable memory, why is the function that state monad stores is of the type:
s -> (a, s)
and not simply:
s -> s
The purpose of the State monad is not to simulate mutable memory, but rather to model computations that both produce a value and have a side effect. Simply, given some initial state of type s, your computation will produce some value of type a, as well as an updated state.
Maybe your computation does not produce a value... Then, easy: the value type a is simply (). Perhaps on the other hand your computation does not have a side effect. Again, easy: you might think of your state transition function (the s -> s argument to modify) as just being id. But often you're dealing with both at the same time.
You can actually use get and put as relatively simple examples:
get :: State s s -- s -> (s, s)
put :: s -> State () -- s -> (s -> ((), s))
get is a computation which, given the current state (the first s), will return it both as a value -- that is, the result of the computation -- and as the "new" (unmodified) state.
put is a computation which, given a new state (the first s) and a current state (the second s), will simply ignore the current state. It will produce () as the computed value (because, of course, it hasn't computed any value!) and hang onto the new state provided.
Presumably you want to use your stateful computations inside of do notation?
You should ask yourself what the Monad instance would look like for a stateful computation defined by
newtype State s = { runState :: s -> s }
The problem to be solved is that you have an input and a series of functions, and you want to apply the functions to the input in order.
If the functions are purely state-changing functions, s -> s on an input of type s, then you don't need State to use them. Haskell is very good at chaining together functions like these, e.g. with the standard composition operator ., or something like foldr (.) id, or foldr id.
However, if the functions both mutate a state and report some result of doing so, so that you could give them the type s -> (s,a), then gluing them all together is a bit of a nuisance. You have to unpack the result tuple and pass the new state value to the next function, use the reported value somewhere else, and then unpack that result, and so on. It's easy to pass the wrong state to an input function because you have to name each result and input explicitly to do the unpacking. You end up with something like this:
let
(res1, s1) = fun1 s0
(res2, s2) = fun2 s1
(res3, s3) = fun3 res1 res2 s1
...
in resN
There, I accidentally passed s1 instead of s2, maybe because I added the second line in later and didn't realise the third line needed changing. When composing the s -> s functions, this problem can't possibly arise because there are no names to get right:
let
resN = fun1 . fun2 . fun3 . -- etc.
So we invented State to do the same trick. State is essentially just a way of gluing functions like s -> (s,a) together in such a way that the right state always gets passed to the right function.
So it's not so much that people went "we want to use State, let's use s -> (s,a)" but rather "we're writing functions like s -> (s,a), let's invent State to make that easy". With functions s -> s, it's already easy and we don't have to invent anything.
As an example of how s -> (s,a) arises naturally, consider parsing: a parser will be given some input, consume some of the input and return a value. In Haskell, this is naturally modelled as taking an input list, and returning a pair of the value and the remaining input - i.e. [Input] -> ([Input], a), or State [Input].
a is the value returned, and the s is the final state.
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/State_Monad#Implementation
I am learning Haskell and trying to understand Monads. I have two questions:
From what I understand, Monad is just another typeclass that declares ways to interact with data inside "containers", including Maybe, List, and IO. It seems clever and clean to implement these 3 things with one concept, but really, the point is so there can be clean error handling in a chain of functions, containers, and side effects. Is this a correct interpretation?
How exactly is the problem of side-effects solved? With this concept of containers, the language essentially says anything inside the containers is non-deterministic (such as i/o). Because lists and IOs are both containers, lists are equivalence-classed with IO, even though values inside lists seem pretty deterministic to me. So what is deterministic and what has side-effects? I can't wrap my head around the idea that a basic value is deterministic, until you stick it in a container (which is no special than the same value with some other values next to it, e.g. Nothing) and it can now be random.
Can someone explain how, intuitively, Haskell gets away with changing state with inputs and output? I'm not seeing the magic here.
The point is so there can be clean error handling in a chain of functions, containers, and side effects. Is this a correct interpretation?
Not really. You've mentioned a lot of concepts that people cite when trying to explain monads, including side effects, error handling and non-determinism, but it sounds like you've gotten the incorrect sense that all of these concepts apply to all monads. But there's one concept you mentioned that does: chaining.
There are two different flavors of this, so I'll explain it two different ways: one without side effects, and one with side effects.
No Side Effects:
Take the following example:
addM :: (Monad m, Num a) => m a -> m a -> m a
addM ma mb = do
a <- ma
b <- mb
return (a + b)
This function adds two numbers, with the twist that they are wrapped in some monad. Which monad? Doesn't matter! In all cases, that special do syntax de-sugars to the following:
addM ma mb =
ma >>= \a ->
mb >>= \b ->
return (a + b)
... or, with operator precedence made explicit:
ma >>= (\a -> mb >>= (\b -> return (a + b)))
Now you can really see that this is a chain of little functions, all composed together, and its behavior will depend on how >>= and return are defined for each monad. If you're familiar with polymorphism in object-oriented languages, this is essentially the same thing: one common interface with multiple implementations. It's slightly more mind-bending than your average OOP interface, since the interface represents a computation policy rather than, say, an animal or a shape or something.
Okay, let's see some examples of how addM behaves across different monads. The Identity monad is a decent place to start, since its definition is trivial:
instance Monad Identity where
return a = Identity a -- create an Identity value
(Identity a) >>= f = f a -- apply f to a
So what happens when we say:
addM (Identity 1) (Identity 2)
Expanding this, step by step:
(Identity 1) >>= (\a -> (Identity 2) >>= (\b -> return (a + b)))
(\a -> (Identity 2) >>= (\b -> return (a + b)) 1
(Identity 2) >>= (\b -> return (1 + b))
(\b -> return (1 + b)) 2
return (1 + 2)
Identity 3
Great. Now, since you mentioned clean error handling, let's look at the Maybe monad. Its definition is only slightly trickier than Identity:
instance Monad Maybe where
return a = Just a -- same as Identity monad!
(Just a) >>= f = f a -- same as Identity monad again!
Nothing >>= _ = Nothing -- the only real difference from Identity
So you can imagine that if we say addM (Just 1) (Just 2) we'll get Just 3. But for grins, let's expand addM Nothing (Just 1) instead:
Nothing >>= (\a -> (Just 1) >>= (\b -> return (a + b)))
Nothing
Or the other way around, addM (Just 1) Nothing:
(Just 1) >>= (\a -> Nothing >>= (\b -> return (a + b)))
(\a -> Nothing >>= (\b -> return (a + b)) 1
Nothing >>= (\b -> return (1 + b))
Nothing
So the Maybe monad's definition of >>= was tweaked to account for failure. When a function is applied to a Maybe value using >>=, you get what you'd expect.
Okay, so you mentioned non-determinism. Yes, the list monad can be thought of as modeling non-determinism in a sense... It's a little weird, but think of the list as representing alternative possible values: [1, 2, 3] is not a collection, it's a single non-deterministic number that could be either one, two or three. That sounds dumb, but it starts to make some sense when you think about how >>= is defined for lists: it applies the given function to each possible value. So addM [1, 2] [3, 4] is actually going to compute all possible sums of those two non-deterministic values: [4, 5, 5, 6].
Okay, now to address your second question...
Side Effects:
Let's say you apply addM to two values in the IO monad, like:
addM (return 1 :: IO Int) (return 2 :: IO Int)
You don't get anything special, just 3 in the IO monad. addM does not read or write any mutable state, so it's kind of no fun. Same goes for the State or ST monads. No fun. So let's use a different function:
fireTheMissiles :: IO Int -- returns the number of casualties
Clearly the world will be different each time missiles are fired. Clearly. Now let's say you're trying to write some totally innocuous, side effect free, non-missile-firing code. Perhaps you're trying once again to add two numbers, but this time without any monads flying around:
add :: Num a => a -> a -> a
add a b = a + b
and all of a sudden your hand slips, and you accidentally typo:
add a b = a + b + fireTheMissiles
An honest mistake, really. The keys were so close together. Fortunately, because fireTheMissiles was of type IO Int rather than simply Int, the compiler is able to avert disaster.
Okay, totally contrived example, but the point is that in the case of IO, ST and friends, the type system keeps effects isolated to some specific context. It doesn't magically eliminate side effects, making code referentially transparent that shouldn't be, but it does make it clear at compile time what scope the effects are limited to.
So getting back to the original point: what does this have to do with chaining or composition of functions? Well, in this case, it's just a handy way of expressing a sequence of effects:
fireTheMissilesTwice :: IO ()
fireTheMissilesTwice = do
a <- fireTheMissiles
print a
b <- fireTheMissiles
print b
Summary:
A monad represents some policy for chaining computations. Identity's policy is pure function composition, Maybe's policy is function composition with failure propogation, IO's policy is impure function composition and so on.
Let me start by pointing at the excellent "You could have invented monads" article. It illustrates how the Monad structure can naturally manifest while you are writing programs. But the tutorial doesn't mention IO, so I will have a stab here at extending the approach.
Let us start with what you probably have already seen - the container monad. Let's say we have:
f, g :: Int -> [Int]
One way of looking at this is that it gives us a number of possible outputs for every possible input. What if we want all possible outputs for the composition of both functions? Giving all possibilities we could get by applying the functions one after the other?
Well, there's a function for that:
fg x = concatMap g $ f x
If we put this more general, we get
fg x = f x >>= g
xs >>= f = concatMap f xs
return x = [x]
Why would we want to wrap it like this? Well, writing our programs primarily using >>= and return gives us some nice properties - for example, we can be sure that it's relatively hard to "forget" solutions. We'd explicitly have to reintroduce it, say by adding another function skip. And also we now have a monad and can use all combinators from the monad library!
Now, let us jump to your trickier example. Let's say the two functions are "side-effecting". That's not non-deterministic, it just means that in theory the whole world is both their input (as it can influence them) as well as their output (as the function can influence it). So we get something like:
f, g :: Int -> RealWorld# -> (Int, RealWorld#)
If we now want f to get the world that g left behind, we'd write:
fg x rw = let (y, rw') = f x rw
(r, rw'') = g y rw'
in (r, rw'')
Or generalized:
fg x = f x >>= g
x >>= f = \rw -> let (y, rw') = x rw
(r, rw'') = f y rw'
in (r, rw'')
return x = \rw -> (x, rw)
Now if the user can only use >>=, return and a few pre-defined IO values we get a nice property again: The user will never actually see the RealWorld# getting passed around! And that is a very good thing, as you aren't really interested in the details of where getLine gets its data from. And again we get all the nice high-level functions from the monad libraries.
So the important things to take away:
The monad captures common patterns in your code, like "always pass all elements of container A to container B" or "pass this real-world-tag through". Often, once you realize that there is a monad in your program, complicated things become simply applications of the right monad combinator.
The monad allows you to completely hide the implementation from the user. It is an excellent encapsulation mechanism, be it for your own internal state or for how IO manages to squeeze non-purity into a pure program in a relatively safe way.
Appendix
In case someone is still scratching his head over RealWorld# as much as I did when I started: There's obviously more magic going on after all the monad abstraction has been removed. Then the compiler will make use of the fact that there can only ever be one "real world". That's good news and bad news:
It follows that the compiler must guarantuee execution ordering between functions (which is what we were after!)
But it also means that actually passing the real world isn't necessary as there is only one we could possibly mean: The one that is current when the function gets executed!
Bottom line is that once execution order is fixed, RealWorld# simply gets optimized out. Therefore programs using the IO monad actually have zero runtime overhead. Also note that using RealWorld# is obviously only one possible way to put IO - but it happens to be the one GHC uses internally. The good thing about monads is that, again, the user really doesn't need to know.
You could see a given monad m as a set/family (or realm, domain, etc.) of actions (think of a C statement). The monad m defines the kind of (side-)effects that its actions may have:
with [] you can define actions which can fork their executions in different "independent parallel worlds";
with Either Foo you can define actions which can fail with errors of type Foo;
with IO you can define actions which can have side-effects on the "outside world" (access files, network, launch processes, do a HTTP GET ...);
you can have a monad whose effect is "randomness" (see package MonadRandom);
you can define a monad whose actions can make a move in a game (say chess, Go…) and receive move from an opponent but are not able to write to your filesystem or anything else.
Summary
If m is a monad, m a is an action which produces a result/output of type a.
The >> and >>= operators are used to create more complex actions out of simpler ones:
a >> b is a macro-action which does action a and then action b;
a >> a does action a and then action a again;
with >>= the second action can depend on the output of the first one.
The exact meaning of what an action is and what doing an action and then another one is depends on the monad: each monad defines an imperative sublanguage with some features/effects.
Simple sequencing (>>)
Let's say with have a given monad M and some actions incrementCounter, decrementCounter, readCounter:
instance M Monad where ...
-- Modify the counter and do not produce any result:
incrementCounter :: M ()
decrementCounter :: M ()
-- Get the current value of the counter
readCounter :: M Integer
Now we would like to do something interesting with those actions. The first thing we would like to do with those actions is to sequence them. As in say C, we would like to be able to do:
// This is C:
counter++;
counter++;
We define an "sequencing operator" >>. Using this operator we can write:
incrementCounter >> incrementCounter
What is the type of "incrementCounter >> incrementCounter"?
It is an action made of two smaller actions like in C you can write composed-statements from atomic statements :
// This is a macro statement made of several statements
{
counter++;
counter++;
}
// and we can use it anywhere we may use a statement:
if (condition) {
counter++;
counter++;
}
it can have the same kind of effects as its subactions;
it does not produce any output/result.
So we would like incrementCounter >> incrementCounter to be of type M (): an (macro-)action with the same kind of possible effects but without any output.
More generally, given two actions:
action1 :: M a
action2 :: M b
we define a a >> b as the macro-action which is obtained by doing (whatever that means in our domain of action) a then b and produces as output the result of the execution of the second action. The type of >> is:
(>>) :: M a -> M b -> M b
or more generally:
(>>) :: (Monad m) => m a -> m b -> m b
We can define bigger sequence of actions from simpler ones:
action1 >> action2 >> action3 >> action4
Input and outputs (>>=)
We would like to be able to increment by something else that 1 at a time:
incrementBy 5
We want to provide some input in our actions, in order to do this we define a function incrementBy taking an Int and producing an action:
incrementBy :: Int -> M ()
Now we can write things like:
incrementCounter >> readCounter >> incrementBy 5
But we have no way to feed the output of readCounter into incrementBy. In order to do this, a slightly more powerful version of our sequencing operator is needed. The >>= operator can feed the output of a given action as input to the next action. We can write:
readCounter >>= incrementBy
It is an action which executes the readCounter action, feeds its output in the incrementBy function and then execute the resulting action.
The type of >>= is:
(>>=) :: Monad m => m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b
A (partial) example
Let's say I have a Prompt monad which can only display informations (text) to the user and ask informations to the user:
-- We don't have access to the internal structure of the Prompt monad
module Prompt (Prompt(), echo, prompt) where
-- Opaque
data Prompt a = ...
instance Monad Prompt where ...
-- Display a line to the CLI:
echo :: String -> Prompt ()
-- Ask a question to the user:
prompt :: String -> Prompt String
Let's try to define a promptBoolean message actions which asks for a question and produces a boolean value.
We use the prompt (message ++ "[y/n]") action and feed its output to a function f:
f "y" should be an action which does nothing but produce True as output;
f "n" should be an action which does nothing but produce False as output;
anything else should restart the action (do the action again);
promptBoolean would look like this:
-- Incomplete version, some bits are missing:
promptBoolean :: String -> M Boolean
promptBoolean message = prompt (message ++ "[y/n]") >>= f
where f result = if result == "y"
then ???? -- We need here an action which does nothing but produce `True` as output
else if result=="n"
then ???? -- We need here an action which does nothing but produce `False` as output
else echo "Input not recognised, try again." >> promptBoolean
Producing a value without effect (return)
In order to fill the missing bits in our promptBoolean function, we need a way to represent dummy actions without any side effect but which only outputs a given value:
-- "return 5" is an action which does nothing but outputs 5
return :: (Monad m) => a -> m a
and we can now write out promptBoolean function:
promptBoolean :: String -> Prompt Boolean
promptBoolean message :: prompt (message ++ "[y/n]") >>= f
where f result = if result=="y"
then return True
else if result=="n"
then return False
else echo "Input not recognised, try again." >> promptBoolean message
By composing those two simple actions (promptBoolean, echo) we can define any kind of dialogue between the user and your program (the actions of the program are deterministic as our monad does not have a "randomness effect").
promptInt :: String -> M Int
promptInt = ... -- similar
-- Classic "guess a number game/dialogue"
guess :: Int -> m()
guess n = promptInt "Guess:" m -> f
where f m = if m == n
then echo "Found"
else (if m > n
then echo "Too big"
then echo "Too small") >> guess n
The operations of a monad
A Monad is a set of actions which can be composed with the return and >>= operators:
>>= for action composition;
return for producing a value without any (side-)effect.
These two operators are the minimal operators needed to define a Monad.
In Haskell, the >> operator is needed as well but it can in fact be derived from >>=:
(>>): Monad m => m a -> m b -> m b
a >> b = a >>= f
where f x = b
In Haskell, an extra fail operator is need as well but this is really a hack (and it might be removed from Monad in the future).
This is the Haskell definition of a Monad:
class Monad m where
return :: m a
(>>=) :: m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b
(>>) :: m a -> m b -> m b -- can be derived from (>>=)
fail :: String -> m a -- mostly a hack
Actions are first-class
One great thing about monads is that actions are first-class. You can take them in a variable, you can define function which take actions as input and produce some other actions as output. For example, we can define a while operator:
-- while x y : does action y while action x output True
while :: (Monad m) => m Boolean -> m a -> m ()
while x y = x >>= f
where f True = y >> while x y
f False = return ()
Summary
A Monad is a set of actions in some domain. The monad/domain define the kind of "effects" which are possible. The >> and >>= operators represent sequencing of actions and monadic expression may be used to represent any kind of "imperative (sub)program" in your (functional) Haskell program.
The great things are that:
you can design your own Monad which supports the features and effects that you want
see Prompt for an example of a "dialogue only subprogram",
see Rand for an example of "sampling only subprogram";
you can write your own control structures (while, throw, catch or more exotic ones) as functions taking actions and composing them in some way to produce a bigger macro-actions.
MonadRandom
A good way of understanding monads, is the MonadRandom package. The Rand monad is made of actions whose output can be random (the effect is randomness). An action in this monad is some kind of random variable (or more exactly a sampling process):
-- Sample an Int from some distribution
action :: Rand Int
Using Rand to do some sampling/random algorithms is quite interesting because you have random variables as first class values:
-- Estimate mean by sampling nsamples times the random variable x
sampleMean :: Real a => Int -> m a -> m a
sampleMean n x = ...
In this setting, the sequence function from Prelude,
sequence :: Monad m => [m a] -> m [a]
becomes
sequence :: [Rand a] -> Rand [a]
It creates a random variable obtained by sampling independently from a list of random variables.
There are three main observations concerning the IO monad:
1) You can't get values out of it. Other types like Maybe might allow to extract values, but neither the monad class interface itself nor the IO data type allow it.
2) "Inside" IO is not only the real value but also that "RealWorld" thing. This dummy value is used to enforce the chaining of actions by the type system: If you have two independent calculations, the use of >>= makes the second calculation dependent on the first.
3) Assume a non-deterministic thing like random :: () -> Int, which isn't allowed in Haskell. If you change the signature to random :: Blubb -> (Blubb, Int), it is allowed, if you make sure that nobody ever can use a Blubb twice: Because in that case all inputs are "different", it is no problem that the outputs are different as well.
Now we can use the fact 1): Nobody can get something out of IO, so we can use the RealWord dummy hidden in IO to serve as a Blubb. There is only one IOin the whole application (the one we get from main), and it takes care of proper sequentiation, as we have seen in 2). Problem solved.
One thing that often helps me to understand the nature of something is to examine it in the most trivial way possible. That way, I'm not getting distracted by potentially unrelated concepts. With that in mind, I think it may be helpful to understand the nature of the Identity Monad, as it's the most trivial implementation of a Monad possible (I think).
What is interesting about the Identity Monad? I think it is that it allows me to express the idea of evaluating expressions in a context defined by other expressions. And to me, that is the essence of every Monad I've encountered (so far).
If you already had a lot of exposure to 'mainstream' programming languages before learning Haskell (like I did), then this doesn't seem very interesting at all. After all, in a mainstream programming language, statements are executed in sequence, one after the other (excepting control-flow constructs, of course). And naturally, we can assume that every statement is evaluated in the context of all previously executed statements and that those previously executed statements may alter the environment and the behavior of the currently executing statement.
All of that is pretty much a foreign concept in a functional, lazy language like Haskell. The order in which computations are evaluated in Haskell is well-defined, but sometimes hard to predict, and even harder to control. And for many kinds of problems, that's just fine. But other sorts of problems (e.g. IO) are hard to solve without some convenient way to establish an implicit order and context between the computations in your program.
As far as side-effects go, specifically, often they can be transformed (via a Monad) in to simple state-passing, which is perfectly legal in a pure functional language. Some Monads don't seem to be of that nature, however. Monads such as the IO Monad or the ST monad literally perform side-effecting actions. There are many ways to think about this, but one way that I think about it is that just because my computations must exist in a world without side-effects, the Monad may not. As such, the Monad is free to establish a context for my computation to execute that is based on side-effects defined by other computations.
Finally, I must disclaim that I am definitely not a Haskell expert. As such, please understand that everything I've said is pretty much my own thoughts on this subject and I may very well disown them later when I understand Monads more fully.
the point is so there can be clean error handling in a chain of functions, containers, and side effects
More or less.
how exactly is the problem of side-effects solved?
A value in the I/O monad, i.e. one of type IO a, should be interpreted as a program. p >> q on IO values can then be interpreted as the operator that combines two programs into one that first executes p, then q. The other monad operators have similar interpretations. By assigning a program to the name main, you declare to the compiler that that is the program that has to be executed by its output object code.
As for the list monad, it's not really related to the I/O monad except in a very abstract mathematical sense. The IO monad gives deterministic computation with side effects, while the list monad gives non-deterministic (but not random!) backtracking search, somewhat similar to Prolog's modus operandi.
With this concept of containers, the language essentially says anything inside the containers is non-deterministic
No. Haskell is deterministic. If you ask for integer addition 2+2 you will always get 4.
"Nondeterministic" is only a metaphor, a way of thinking. Everything is deterministic under the hood. If you have this code:
do x <- [4,5]
y <- [0,1]
return (x+y)
it is roughly equivalent to Python code
l = []
for x in [4,5]:
for y in [0,1]:
l.append(x+y)
You see nondeterminism here? No, it's deterministic construction of a list. Run it twice, you'll get the same numbers in the same order.
You can describe it this way: Choose arbitrary x from [4,5]. Choose arbitrary y from [0,1]. Return x+y. Collect all possible results.
That way seems to involve nondeterminism, but it's only a nested loop (list comprehension). There is no "real" nondeterminism here, it's simulated by checking all possibilities. Nondeterminism is an illusion. The code only appears to be nondeterministic.
This code using State monad:
do put 0
x <- get
put (x+2)
y <- get
return (y+3)
gives 5 and seems to involve changing state. As with lists it's an illusion. There are no "variables" that change (as in imperative languages). Everything is nonmutable under the hood.
You can describe the code this way: put 0 to a variable. Read the value of a variable to x. Put (x+2) to the variable. Read the variable to y, and return y+3.
That way seems to involve state, but it's only composing functions passing additional parameter. There is no "real" mutability here, it's simulated by composition. Mutability is an illusion. The code only appears to be using it.
Haskell does it this way: you've got functions
a -> s -> (b,s)
This function takes and old value of state and returns new value. It does not involve mutability or change variables. It's a function in mathematical sense.
For example the function "put" takes new value of state, ignores current state and returns new state:
put x _ = ((), x)
Just like you can compose two normal functions
a -> b
b -> c
into
a -> c
using (.) operator you can compose "state" transformers
a -> s -> (b,s)
b -> s -> (c,s)
into a single function
a -> s -> (c,s)
Try writing the composition operator yourself. This is what really happens, there are no "side effects" only passing arguments to functions.
From what I understand, Monad is just another typeclass that declares ways to interact with data [...]
...providing an interface common to all those types which have an instance. This can then be used to provide generic definitions which work across all monadic types.
It seems clever and clean to implement these 3 things with one concept [...]
...the only three things that are implemented are the instances for those three types (list, Maybe and IO) - the types themselves are defined independently elsewhere.
[...] but really, the point is so there can be clean error handling in a chain of functions, containers, and side effects.
Not just error handling e.g. consider ST - without the monadic interface, you would have to pass the encapsulated-state directly and correctly...a tiresome task.
How exactly is the problem of side-effects solved?
Short answer: Haskell solves manages them by using types to indicate their presence.
Can someone explain how, intuitively, Haskell gets away with changing state with inputs and output?
"Intuitively"...like what's available over here? Let's try a simple direct comparison instead:
From How to Declare an Imperative by Philip Wadler:
(* page 26 *)
type 'a io = unit -> 'a
infix >>=
val >>= : 'a io * ('a -> 'b io) -> 'b io
fun m >>= k = fn () => let
val x = m ()
val y = k x ()
in
y
end
val return : 'a -> 'a io
fun return x = fn () => x
val putc : char -> unit io
fun putc c = fn () => putcML c
val getc : char io
val getc = fn () => getcML ()
fun getcML () =
valOf(TextIO.input1(TextIO.stdIn))
(* page 25 *)
fun putcML c =
TextIO.output1(TextIO.stdOut,c)
Based on these two answers of mine, this is my Haskell translation:
type IO a = OI -> a
(>>=) :: IO a -> (a -> IO b) -> IO b
m >>= k = \ u -> let !(u1, u2) = part u in
let !x = m u1 in
let !y = k x u2 in
y
return :: a -> IO a
return x = \ u -> let !_ = part u in x
putc :: Char -> IO ()
putc c = \ u -> putcOI c u
getc :: IO Char
getc = \ u -> getcOI u
-- primitives
data OI
partOI :: OI -> (OI, OI)
putcOI :: Char -> OI -> ()
getcOI :: OI -> Char
Now remember that short answer about side-effects?
Haskell manages them by using types to indicate their presence.
Data.Char.chr :: Int -> Char -- no side effects
getChar :: IO Char -- side effects at
{- :: OI -> Char -} -- work: beware!