Syntactic and semantic fun with monads

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• Fredrik Dahlqvist (UCL)
• Friday 24 November 2017, 11:00-12:00
• Computer Science, The Sloman Lounge (UG).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Paul Taylor.

There are still plenty of interesting things to say about the use of monads in computer science. In this talk I will sketch two recent strands of research which concern the syntactic and the semantic role of monads.

In the first half of the talk I will describe a procedure for building programming languages layer by layer, by combining monads. It is well-known that the composition of two monads is in general not a monad. The procedure which I will describe either (i) shows that the composition of two monads is a monad by concretely building a distributive law, or (ii) identifies the precise algebraic obstacle to the existence of a distributive law and allows us to troubleshoot the language’s construction. As an application of this procedure, I will give a principled account of the network specification language ProbNetKAT.

In the second half of the talk I will look at monads as semantic devices which encode computational effects. I will present some work which aims to answer the following question: what programming features can a given effect monad support? By completely classifying certain natural transformations I will show that this question can be answered very precisely for many well-known monads. As an illustration I will show how to list all of Haskell’s MonadPlus structures for well-known monads.

This talk is part of the Theoretical computer science seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Computer Science Departmental Series
• Computer Science Distinguished Seminars
• Computer Science, The Sloman Lounge (UG)
• Theoretical computer science seminar
• computer sience

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