Equivalence of Applicative Functors and Multifunctors
Programming Languages
2024-01-26 v1 Logic in Computer Science
Abstract
McBride and Paterson introduced Applicative functors to Haskell, which are equivalent to the lax monoidal functors (with strength) of category theory. Applicative functors F are presented via idiomatic application and laws that are a bit hard to remember. Capriotti and Kaposi observed that applicative functors can be conceived as multifunctors, i.e., by a family liftA : of zipWith-like functions that generalize pure , fmap and liftA2 . This reduces the associated laws to just the first functor law and a uniform scheme of second (multi)functor laws, i.e., a composition law for liftA. In this note, we rigorously prove that applicative functors are in fact equivalent to multifunctors, by interderiving their laws.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2401.14286,
title = {Equivalence of Applicative Functors and Multifunctors},
author = {Andreas Abel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.14286},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
6 pages