Useful operations on free arrows

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We know free monads are useful, and packages like Operational make it easy to define new monads by only caring about the application-specific effects, not the monadic structure itself.

We can easily define "free arrows" analogous to how free monads are defined:

{-# LANGUAGE GADTs #-}
module FreeA
       ( FreeA, effect
       ) where

import Prelude hiding ((.), id)
import Control.Category
import Control.Arrow
import Control.Applicative
import Data.Monoid

data FreeA eff a b where
    Pure :: (a -> b) -> FreeA eff a b
    Effect :: eff a b -> FreeA eff a b
    Seq :: FreeA eff a b -> FreeA eff b c -> FreeA eff a c
    Par :: FreeA eff a₁ b₁ -> FreeA eff a₂ b₂ -> FreeA eff (a₁, a₂) (b₁, b₂)

effect :: eff a b -> FreeA eff a b
effect = Effect

instance Category (FreeA eff) where
    id = Pure id
    (.) = flip Seq

instance Arrow (FreeA eff) where
    arr = Pure
    first f = Par f id
    second f = Par id f
    (***) = Par

My question is, what would be the most useful generic operations on free arrows? For my particular application, I needed special cases of these two:

{-# LANGUAGE Rank2Types #-}
{-# LANGUAGE ScopedTypeVariables #-}
analyze :: forall f eff a₀ b₀ r. (Applicative f, Monoid r)
        => (forall a b. eff a b -> f r)
        -> FreeA eff a₀ b₀ -> f r
analyze visit = go
  where
    go :: forall a b. FreeA eff a b -> f r
    go arr = case arr of
        Pure _ -> pure mempty
        Seq f₁ f₂ -> mappend <$> go f₁ <*> go f₂
        Par f₁ f₂ -> mappend <$> go f₁ <*> go f₂
        Effect eff -> visit eff

evalA :: forall eff arr a₀ b₀. (Arrow arr) => (forall a b. eff a b -> arr a b) -> FreeA eff a₀ b₀ -> arr a₀ b₀
evalA exec = go
  where
    go :: forall a b. FreeA eff a b -> arr a b
    go freeA = case freeA of
        Pure f -> arr f
        Seq f₁ f₂ -> go f₂ . go f₁
        Par f₁ f₂ -> go f₁ *** go f₂
        Effect eff -> exec eff

but I don't have any theoretical arguments on why these (and not others) would be the useful ones.

1 Answers
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