Do Notation Considered Harmful
source link: https://wiki.haskell.org/Do_notation_considered_harmful
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Criticism
Haskell'sdo notation is popular and ubiquitous. However we shall not ignore that there are several problems. Here we like to shed some light on aspects you may not have thought about, so far.
Didactics
The
do
notation hides functional details.
This is wanted in order to simplify writing imperative style code fragments.
The downsides are that:
-
Since
do
notation is used almost everywhereIO
takes place, newcomers quickly believe that thedo
notation is necessary for doingIO
, -
Newcomers might think that
IO
is somehow special and non-functional, in contrast to the advertisement for Haskell being purely functional, - Newcomers might think that the order of statements determines the order of execution.
These misunderstandings let people write clumsy code like
do putStrLn "text"
instead of
putStrLn "text"
or
do text <- getLine return text
instead of
getLine
or
do text <- readFile "foo" writeFile "bar" text
instead of
readFile "foo" >>= writeFile "bar"
.
The order of statements is also not the criterion for the evaluation order. Also here only the data dependencies count. See for instance
do x <- Just (3+5) y <- Just (5*7) return (x-y)
where
3+5
and
5*7
can be evaluated in any order, also in parallel.
Or consider
do x <- Just (3+5) y <- Nothing return (x-y)
where
3+5
is probably not evaluated at all, because its result is not necessary to find out that the entire
do
describes a
Nothing
.
Library design
Unfortunately, the
do
notation is so popular that people write more things with monads than necessary. See for instance theBinary package. It contains the
Put
monad, which in principle has nothing to do with a monad
.
All "put" operations have the monadic result
()
.
In fact it is a
Writer
monad using the
Builder
type, and all you need is just the
Builder
monoid.
Even more unfortunate, theapplicative functors were introduced to Haskell's standard libraries only aftermonads andarrows, thus many types are instances of
Monad
and
Arrow
classes, but not as many are instances of
Applicative
. There is no special syntax for applicative functors because it is hardly necessary.
You just write
data Header = Header Char Int Bool readHeader :: Get Header readHeader = liftA3 Header get get get
or
readHeader = Header <$> get <*> get <*> get
Not using monads, along with the
do
notation, can have advantages.
Consider a generator of unique identifiers. First you might think of a
State
monad which increments a counter each time an identifier is requested.
run :: State Int a -> a run m = evalState m 0 newId :: State Int Int newId = do n <- get modify succ return n example :: (Int -> Int -> a) -> a example f = run $ do x <- newId y <- newId return (f x y)
If you are confident that you will not need the counter state at the end and
that you will not combine blocks of code using the counter
(where the second block needs the state at the end of the first block),
you can enforce a more strict scheme of usage. The following is like a
Reader
monad, where we call
local
on an incremented counter for each generated identifier. Alternatively you can view it asContinuation monad.
newtype T a = T (Int -> a) run :: T a -> a run (T f) = f 0 newId :: (Int -> T a) -> T a newId f = T $ \i -> case f i of T g -> g (succ i) example :: (Int -> Int -> T a) -> a example f = run $ newId $ \a -> newId $ \b -> f a b
This way users cannot accidentally place a
return
somewhere in a
do
block where it has no effect.
Safety
This page addresses an aspect of Haskell style, which is to some extent a matter of taste. Just pick what you find appropriate for you and ignore the rest.
With
do
notation we have kept alive a dark side of the C programming language:
The silent neglect of return values of functions.
In an imperative language it is common to return an error code and provide the real work by side effects.
In Haskell this cannot happen, because functions have no side effects.
If you ignore the result of a Haskell function, the function will not even be evaluated.
The situation is different for
IO
:
While processing the
IO
, you might still ignore the contained return value.
You can write
do getLine putStrLn "text"
and thus silently ignore the result of
getLine
.
The same applies to
do System.Cmd.system "echo foo >bar"
where you ignore the
ExitCode
.
Is this behaviour wanted?
There are possibilities to explicitly ignore return values in safety oriented languages
(e.g. EVAL
in Modula-3
).
Haskell does not need this, because you can already write
do _ <- System.Cmd.system "echo foo >bar" return ()
Writing
_ <-
should always make you cautious whether ignoring the result is the right thing to do.
The possibility for silently ignoring monadic return values is not entirely the fault of the
do
notation.
It would suffice to restrict the type of the
(>>)
combinator to
(>>) :: m () -> m a -> m a
This way, you can omit
_ <-
only if the monadic return value has type
()
.
New developments:
- GHC since version 6.12 emits a warning when you silently ignore a return value
-
There is a new function called
void
that makes ignoring of return values explicit:GHC ticket 3292
Happy with less sugar
Additional combinators
Using the infix combinators for writing functions simplifies the addition of new combinators.
Consider for instance a monad forrandom distributions.
This monad cannot be an instance of
MonadPlus
,
because there is no
mzero
(it would be an empty list of events, but their probabilities do not sum up to 1)
and
mplus
is not associative because we have to normalize the sum of probabilities to 1.
Thus we cannot use standard
guard
for this monad.
However we would like to write the following:
do f <- family guard (existsBoy f) return f
Given a custom combinator which performs a filtering with subsequent normalization called
(>>=?) :: Distribution a -> (a -> Bool) -> Distribution a
we can rewrite this easily:
family >>=? existsBoy
Note that the
(>>=?)
combinator introduces the risk of returning an invalid distribution (empty list of events),
but it seems that we have to live with that problem.
Alternative combinators
If you are used to writing monadic functions using infix combinators
(>>)
and
(>>=)
you can easily switch to a different set of combinators.
This is useful when there is a monadic structure that does not fit into the current
Monad
type constructor class, where the monadic result type cannot be constrained.
This is e.g. useful for the Set data type
, where the element type must have a total order.
Useful applications
It shall be mentioned that the
do
sometimes takes the burden away from you of writing boring things.
E.g. in
getRight :: Either a b -> Maybe b getRight y = do Right x <- y return x
a
case
on
y
is included, which calls
fail
if
y
is not a
Right
(i.e.
Left
), and thus returns
Nothing
in this case.
Also the
mdo
notation proves useful, since it maintains a set of variables for you in a safe manner.
Compare
mdo x <- f x y z y <- g x y z z <- h x y z return (x+y+z)
and
mfix (\ ~( ~(x,y,z), _) -> do x <- f x y z y <- g x y z z <- h x y z return ((x,y,z),x+y+z))
See also
- Paul Hudak in Haskell-Cafe: A regressive view of support for imperative programming in Haskell
- Data.Syntaxfree on Wordpress: Do-notation considered harmful
- Things to avoid#do notation
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