[pl-seminar] Monad monologue on Monday

[JOHN CYPHERT <jcyphert@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi, all,

I plan to continue to talk about monads on Monday Jun 3 in 3310 at noon.

Here's my plan for Monday

 - I want to talk more about the use of monads in programming. Last time I defined a monad as a functor, with 2 parametric polymorphic functions: return and join. This is a fine definition, but it is not the standard programming one. I will give 2 more definitions for a monad to give a connection to the standard programming way of defining monads. 

 - I will show that a do block in haskell is syntactic sugar for monadic operations.

 - I hinted that to truly be a monad, monadic laws need to be satisfied. I will give and try to motivate these monadic laws.

 - We'll then try and make things a little categorical by generalizing the design pattern monads solve in programming to the Kliesli category.

 - I would then like to briefly give the formal categorical definition of a monad.

 - I think there will be some time left. Rather than start a new thread about monads, I would like to use this time to give more practical programming examples, such as ways of handling non-determinism, state, IO, etc. with monads.

If anyone has any questions let me know.

John