Introduction

Part I has introduced the monad concept and Part II has provided an understanding of a number of common, useful monads in the standard Haskell libraries. This is not enough to put monads into heavy practice, however, because in the real world you often want computations which combine aspects of more than one monad at the same time, such as stateful, non-determistic computations or computations which make use of continuations and perform I/O. When one computation is a strict subset of the other, it is possible to perform the monad computations separately, unless the sub-computation is performed in a one-way monad.

Often, the computations can't be performed in isolation. In this case, what is needed is a monad that combines the features of the two monads into a single computation. It is inefficient and poor practice to write a new monad instance with the required characteristics each time a new combination is desired. Instead, we would prefer to develop a way to combine the standard monads to produce the needed hybrids. The technique that lets us do exactly that is called monad transformers.

Monad transformers are the topic of Part III, and they are explained by revisiting earlier examples to see how monad transformers can be used to add more realistic capabilities to them. It may be helpful to review the earlier examples as they are re-examined.