Tonight I spent over an hour learning that there are two functions called “forM_” in haskell.

The first, which I was already familiar with, lives in Control.Monad. Its purpose is to take a list of values, apply some function to them all to produce a list of actions, and then run these actions one after the other.

The other one, which I did not know about, lives in Data.Foldable. It does exactly the same job, but it works on any “Foldable” data type; ie. those which can be collapsed/folded in some way to a single summary value. Lists are foldable. Maps are also foldable (across their elements, not their keys).

And this was the cause of my perplexification this evening; I had been storing my data in a list, and using forM_ (the monadic one, the only which I knew about!) to process it. At some point, I decided to change to storing my data in a map instead, and ran the compiler to see the errors which would point me to the bits of code I needed to fix up.

Except the compiler happily compiled everything without errors. *confusion*

Much headscratching followed, until eventually I added “-ddump-tc” to get ghc to dump out the results of its typechecking pass. This lead me to the root cause: I had been picking up forM_ from Data.Foldable all along, not Control.Monad. Duh! Everything had been working fine up until then, since Foldable.forM_ and Monad.forM_ operate identically on lists. But the former also works on Data.Maps whereas the latter does not.

I’m sure there’s a moral to this story. I’m just not sure what it is yet.