Combining StateT and State monads

Question

Lets say I have a function

f :: State [Int] Int

and a function:

g :: StateT [Int] IO Int

I want to use f in g and pass the state between them. Is there a library function for
StateT (return . runState f)? Or in general, given a monad transformer with a corresponding monad, is there a library function for it?

Answer 1

In even more general, what you're trying to do is apply a transformation to an inner layer of a transformer stack. For two arbitrary monads, the type signature might look something like this:

fmapMT :: (MonadTrans t, Monad m1, Monad m2) => (m1 a -> m2 a) -> t m1 a -> t m2 a

Basically a higher-level fmap. In fact, it would probably make even more sense to combine it with a map over the final parameter as well:

fmapMT :: (MonadTrans t, Monad m1, Monad m2) => (m1 a -> m2 b) -> t m1 a -> t m2 b

Clearly this isn't going to be possible in all cases, though when the "source" monad is Identity it's likely to be easier, but I can imagine defining another type class for the places it does work. I don't think there's anything like this in the typical monad transformer libraries; however, some browsing on hackage turns up something very similar in the Monatron package:

class MonadT t => FMonadT t where
    tmap' :: FunctorD m -> FunctorD n -> (a -> b) 
             -> (forall x. m x -> n x) -> t m a -> t n b

tmap :: (FMonadT t, Functor m, Functor n) => (forall b. m b -> n b) 
        -> t m a -> t n a
tmap = tmap' functor functor id

In the signature for tmap', the FunctorD types are basically ad-hoc implementations of fmap instead of using Functor instances directly.

Also, for two Functor-like type constructors F and G, a function with a type like (forall a. F a -> G a) describes a natural transformation from F to G. There's quite possibly another implementation of the transformer map that you want somewhere in the category-extras package but I'm not sure what the category-theoretic version of a monad transformer would be so I don't know what it might be called.

Since tmap requires only a Functor instance (which any Monad must have) and a natural transformation, and any Monad has a natural transformation from the Identity monad provided by return, the function you want can be written generically for any instance of FMonadT as tmap (return . runIdentity)--assuming the "basic" monad is defined as a synonym for the transformer applied to Identity, at any rate, which is generally the case with transformer libraries.

Getting back to your specific example, note that Monatron does indeed have an instance of FMonadT for StateT.