Frama-C API - Composition

This module exposes two functors that, given a monad T called the "interior monad" and a monad S called the "exterior monad", build a monad of type 'a T.t S.t. To be able to do so, one has to provide a swap function that, simply put, swap the exterior monad out of the interior one. In other word, this function allows fixing "badly ordered" monads compositions, in the sens that they are applied in the opposite order as the desired one.

For example, one may want to combine the State monad and the Option monad to represent a stateful computation that may fail. To do so, one can either rewrite all the needed monadic operations, which may prove difficult, or use the provided functors of this module. Using the Option monad as the interior and the State monad as the exterior, one can trivially provide the following swap function:

let swap (m : 'a State.t Option.t) : 'a Option.t State.t =
  match m with
  | None -> State.return None
  | Some s -> State.map Option.return s

Note here that trying to reverse the order of the Option and State monads makes the swap function way harder to write. Moreover, the resulting function does not actually satisfy the required axioms.

Indeed, all swap functions will not result in a valid composed monad. To produce such a monad, the given swap function must verify the following equations: 1. ∀t: 'a T.t, swap (T.map S.return t) ≣ S.return t 2. ∀s: 'a S.t, swap (T.return s) ≣ S.map T.return s 3. ∀x: 'a S.t S.t T.t, swap (T.map S.flatten x) ≣ S.flatten (S.map swap (swap x)) 4. ∀x: 'a S.t T.t T.t, swap (T.flatten x) ≣ S.map T.flatten (swap (T.map swap x)) More details on this at the end of this file.

• since Frama-C+dev

Notes

Monads composition is a notoriously difficult topic, and no general approach exists. The one provided in this module is, in theory, quite restrictive as the swap function, also called a distributive law, has to satisfy the four presented axioms to guarantee that a valid monad can be built. Roughly speaking, those axioms enforce the idea that the distributive law must preserve all structures in the two monads.

Distributive laws, their application to monads composition and weakenings of their axioms are a broad topic with profound implications in category theory. Even if none of this formal knowledge is required to use this module, one can check the following references to satisfy their curiosity.

@see Jon Beck paper "Distributive laws" for more details on this topic. @see Alexandre Goy thesis "On the compositionality of monads via weak distributive laws" for details on how to relax some of those axioms.