lift package:foundation

Lift a computation from an inner monad to the current transformer monad

Lift a binary function to actions. Some functors support an implementation of liftA2 that is more efficient than the default one. In particular, if fmap is an expensive operation, it is likely better to use liftA2 than to fmap over the structure and then use <*>. This became a typeclass method in 4.10.0.0. Prior to that, it was a function defined in terms of <*> and fmap.

Example

>>> liftA2 (,) (Just 3) (Just 5)
Just (3,5)

Lift a computation from the IO monad. This allows us to run IO computations in any monadic stack, so long as it supports these kinds of operations (i.e. IO is the base monad for the stack).

Example

import Control.Monad.Trans.State -- from the "transformers" library

printState :: Show s => StateT s IO ()
printState = do
state <- get
liftIO $ print state

Had we omitted liftIO, we would have ended up with this error:

• Couldn't match type ‘IO’ with ‘StateT s IO’
Expected type: StateT s IO ()
Actual type: IO ()

The important part here is the mismatch between StateT s IO () and IO (). Luckily, we know of a function that takes an IO a and returns an (m a): liftIO, enabling us to run the program and see the expected results:

> evalStateT printState "hello"
"hello"

> evalStateT printState 3
3