Andrej Bauer in Matija Pretnar: A first look at F/X

Abstract: Eugenio Moggi's treatment of computational effects as monads has been very popular, especially in the Haskell community. Lately Gordon Plotkin and John Power promoted the view that in many cases the monads are generated by algebraic theories which describe the operations. One advantage of this is that it is easier to combine algebraic theories than general monads. The approach has been developed further by Gordon Plotkin and Matija Pretnar, who also developed a unified treatment of handlers.

In this talk we present an early prototype for a programming language F/X in which effects are presented by their generic operations instead of monads. The language is also equipped with handlers which allow us to express a number of interesting programming techniques.