The description of maybe-compose in draft #7 is much clearer.  I suggest distinguishing "values" (not the procedure, but the general sense) and "values wrapped by Maybe/Either" more strictly to avoid confusion.

That is, the third paragraph of maybe-compose currently says:

   It is an error if one of the mprocs does not accept as arguments the number of values produced by its predecessor.

But what the predecessor produces is one value, Maybe or Either.   So how about saying:

   It is an error if one of the mprocs does not accept as arguments the number of values wrapped by Just/Right produced by its predecessor.

The description of maybe-bind can also be adjusted, because mproc can't be applied to maybe/either directly.  How about something like this:

   Monadic bind.  If maybe/either is Nothing/ a Left, it is returned as is.  If maybe/either is a Just/Right, it behaves as if they invoked maybe-compose/either-compose on mprocs and applied the resulting mproc to the payload of the Just/Right, returning the result Maybe/Either.

If it is not too verbose, showing the invariances in the srfi text would help to grasp their relations:

(maybe-compose x y z) == (maybe-compose x (maybe-compose y z))
                                      == (maybe-compose (maybe-compose x y) z)

(maybe-bind m x y ...) == (maybe-bind m (maybe-compose x y ...))
                                    == (maybe-ref m nothing (maybe-compose x y ...))

The reference implementation needs to be adjusted as well.  The current definition of maybe-compose returns a procedure that takes one Maybe, not its payload(s).  If Wolfgang is busy I can send PR.

--shiro


On Sat, Jun 13, 2020 at 12:14 PM John Cowan <xxxxxx@ccil.org> wrote:


On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 6:30 AM Shiro Kawai <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

'mproc' is a procedure   a* -> Container b*   where I note "zero or more values' as a* and b*,
and Container is either Maybe or Either.

That's right: an mproc accepts an arbitrary number of values and returns a single value.
 

The first line says maybe-compose returns an mproc.

Correct.
 

The second line says the returned procedure takes a single value 'Container a*'.

That's wrong: it takes an arbitrary number of values not in a container.  Fixed.
 
If *-compose is indeed a composition of mprocs, I expect the following relations and I feel it's more natural:

(maybe-compose x y z) == (maybe-compose x (maybe-compose y z))
                                      == (maybe-compose (maybe-compose x y) z)

(maybe-bind m x y) == (maybe-bind m (maybe-compose x y))

That is the intention.  Hopefully the language of the new draft specifies this correctly.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        xxxxxx@ccil.org
What asininity could I have uttered that they applaud me thus?
        --Phocion, Greek orator