How much is applicative really about applying, rather than “combining”?

Question

For an uncertainty-propagating Approximate type, I'd like to have instances for Functor through Monad. This however doesn't work because I need a vector space structure on the contained types, so it must actually be restricted versions of the classes. As there still doesn't seem to be a standard library for those (or is there? please point me. There's rmonad, but it uses * rather than Constraint as the context kind, which seems just outdated to me), I wrote my own version for the time being.

It all works easy for Functor

class CFunctor f where
  type CFunctorCtxt f a :: Constraint
  cfmap :: (CFunctorCtxt f a, CFunctorCtxt f b)  => (a -> b) -> f a -> f b

instance CFunctor Approximate where
  type CFunctorCtxt Approximate a = FScalarBasisSpace a
  f `cfmap` Approximate v us = Approximate v' us'
   where v' = f v
         us' = ...

but a direct translation of Applicative, like

class CFunctor f => CApplicative' f where
  type CApplicative'Ctxt f a :: Constraint
  cpure' :: (CApplicative'Ctxt f a) => a -> f a
  (#<*>#) :: ( CApplicative'Ctxt f a
             , CApplicative'Ctxt f (a->b)
             , CApplicative'Ctxt f b)        => f(a->b) -> f a -> f b

is not possible because functions a->b do not have the necessary vector space structure* FScalarBasisSpace.

What does work, however, is to change the definition of the restricted applicative class:

class CFunctor f => CApplicative f where
  type CApplicativeCtxt f a :: Constraint
  cpure :: CAppFunctorCtxt f a  => a -> f a
  cliftA2 :: ( CAppFunctorCtxt f a
             , CAppFunctorCtxt f b
             , CAppFunctorCtxt f c )        => (a->b->c) -> f a -> f b -> f c

and then defining <*># rather than cliftA2 as a free function

(<*>#) = cliftA2 ($)

instead of a method. Without the constraint, that's completely equivalent (in fact, many Applicative instances go this way anyway), but in this case it's actually better: (<*>#) still has the constraint on a->b which Approximate can't fulfill, but that doesn't hurt the applicative instance, and I can still do useful stuff like

ghci> cliftA2 (\x y -> (x+y)/x^2) (3±0.2) (5±0.3)        :: Approximate Double 
0.8888888888888888 +/- 0.10301238090045711

I reckon the situation would essentially the same for many other uses of CApplicative, for instance the Set example that's already given in the original blog post on constraint kinds.

So my question:

is <*> more fundamental than liftA2?

Again, in the unconstrained case they're equivalent anyway. I actually have found liftA2 easier to understand, but in Haskell it's probably just more natural to think about passing "containers of functions" rather than containers of objects and some "global" operation to combine them. And <*> directly induces all the liftAμ for μ ∊ ℕ, not just liftA2; doing that from liftA2 only doesn't really work.

But then, these constrained classes seem to make quite a point for liftA2. In particular, it allows CApplicative instances for all CMonads, which does not work when <*># is the base method. And I think we all agree that Applicative should always be more general than Monad.

What would the category theorists say to all of this? And is there a way to get the general liftAμ without a->b needing to fulfill the associated constraint?

---

*Linear functions of that type actually do have the vector space structure, but I definitely can't restrict myself to those.

Answer 1

As I understand it (as a non---category theorist), the fundamental operation is zip :: f a -> f b -> f (a, b) (mapping a pair of effectful computations to an effectful computation resulting in a pair).

You can then define

• fx <*> fy = uncurry ($) <$> zip fx fy
• liftA2 g fx fy = uncurry g <$> zip fx fy

See this post by Edward Yang, which I found via the Typeclassopedia.