What are Alternative’s “some” and “many” useful for?

TL;DR: some is one or more, many is 0 or more results collected from performing the same computation over and over by the familiar maximal munch rule. For this to make sense, some state passing (and alteration) must take place reducing the domain of possibilities somehow, otherwise it will repeat ad infinitum. And state passing … Read more

Confused by the meaning of the ‘Alternative’ type class and its relationship to other type classes

To begin with, let me offer short answers to each of these questions. I will then expand each into a longer detailed answer, but these short ones will hopefully help in navigating those. No, Alternative and Monoid don’t mean different things; Alternative is for types which have the structure both of Applicative and of Monoid. … Read more