Kevin's Weblog

Recently, Reg Braithwaite wrote about Object#andand, a method for chaining computations that can fail. It’s not clear from his post if he realizes it (maybe he considers it a completely uninteresting observation), but he’s become the latest person to reinvent monads. In Haskell, his proposed &&. operator is spelled >>= (and is significantly more general, as he’s really only created the Maybe monad).

(Although I originally claimed the second half had no similar connection, after thinking about it more, I now retract that. Haskell’s >> operator chains two computations, ignoring the result of the first; in essence performing it just for the “side effects”. Object#me and returning have a similar flavor, although they permit a far wider class of side effects.)