Nottingham FP Lab Blog

monads and comonads

by Thorsten on December 16, 2005.
Tagged as: Lunches.

Inspired by the discussion on comonads we had two weeks ago I gave a little tutorial on monads and comonads which was finished off by Neil.

A standard example for monads are arising from substitution: Consider a the set of terms \mu X.F\,X given by an endofunctor F. Terms over a given set of variables can be encoded as M_F\,X = \mu X.X + F\,X and this gives rise to a monad, where \eta \in X \to M_F\,X embedding variables into terms and \hat{f}\in M_F\,X\to M_F\,Y corresponds to applying a substitution given by f\in X\to M_F\,Y.

Dually, we construct a comonad C_F\,Y = \nu X.Y\times F\,X which corresponds to infinite terms with labels, the counit \epsilon \in M_F\,X \to X returns the top-level label and \check{f}\in C_F\,X \to C_F\,Y relabels a tree according to a relabelling function f \in X \to C_F\,Y. The example of streams which inspired this little tutorial is an instance of this, if we choose F\,X=X, i.e. the identity functor, since C_F\,Y = \nu X.Y\times X \simeq \mathbb{N}\to Y.

Neil explained that the monad M_F is the free monad over F, i.e. this is given by applying the left adjoint of the forgetful functor from the category of monads to the category of endofunctors, dually C_F is the cofree comonad. Neil and his student Fed also investigated the monad M^*_F\,Y=\nu X.Y + F\,X which is the fully iterative monad over F. However, it seems that its dual C^*_F\,Y=\mu X.Y\times F\,X has not yet attracted much attention.


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