Implementing collection classes with monads

• Authors: Ernie G. Manes
• Venue: Mathematical Structures in Computer Science
• Year: 1998

In object-oriented programming, there are many notions of ‘collection with members in X’. This paper offers an axiomatic theory of collections based on monads in the category of sets and total functions. Heuristically, the axioms defining a collection monad state that each collection has a finite set of members of X, that pure 1-element collections exist and that a collection of collections flattens to a single collection whose members are the union of the members of the constituent collections. The relationship between monads and universal algebra leads to a formal definition of collection implementation in terms of tree-processing. Ideas from elementary category theory underly the classification of collections. For example, collections can be zipped if and only if the monad's endofunctor preserves pullbacks. Or, a collection can be uniquely specified by its shape and list of data if the morphisms of the Kleisli category of the monad are all deterministic, and the converse holds for commutative monads. Again, a collection monad is ordered if the monad's functor preserves equalizers of monomorphisms (so, in particular, if collections can be zipped the monad is ordered). Every implementable monad is ordered. It is shown using the well-ordering principle that a collection monad is ordered if and only if its functor admits an appropriated list-valued natural transformation that lists the members of each collection.