[Haskell-cafe] Is there a generic way to detect "mzero"?
aslatter at gmail.com
Mon Mar 26 21:24:09 CEST 2012
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Ting Lei <tinlyx at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I was writing a code trying to use MonadPlus to detect some error cases
> (representing missing values etc. in pure code). With the Maybe monad, I can
> do this:
> can0 :: (a -> Maybe b) -> a -> Bool
> can0 f x = case f x of
> Nothing -> False
> Just x -> True
> And I got the expected result:
> *Main> can0 (\x -> Just x) 1
> But, when I try to generalize this using MonadPlus, as follows:
> can :: (MonadPlus m) => (a -> m b) -> a -> Bool
> can f x = case f x of
> mzero -> False
> _ -> True
> I got a warning:
> Warning: Pattern match(es) are overlapped
> In a case alternative: _ -> ...
> Ok, modules loaded: Main.
Well, you can sort of do it with only MonadPlus - but it really
depends on your choice of Monad whether or not it does anything like
what you want:
can :: (MonadPlus m) => (a -> m ()) -> a -> m Bool
can f x = (f x >> return True) <|> return false
For 'Maybe' this works great, but for something like 'List' I couldn't
even tell you what it would do without reasoning through it.
So you might be better off with the suggestion from Tobias using Eq
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