Proposal: bind

I often find myself writing:

fmap (mu bar)
     (foo zot)

Then I decide to change the type of mu, so instead I want to just write:

bind (mu bar)
     (foo zot)

Which is just like fmap but the function can run in the monad. Similar to traverse:

(Traversable t, Applicative f) => (a -> f b) -> t a -> f (t b)

As someone who isn’t a fan of operators, I generally am appreciative of alternative regular plain English word versions of functions, which I find easier to type, read and edit. Currently without defining such a handy name, I have to transform the code to this:

mu bar =<<
foo zot

The name for this function is a no-brainer ((>>=) is now pronnounced “bind”):

bind :: Monad m => (a -> m b) -> m a -> m b
bind = (=<<)

For comparison, the not-very-pleasant <$> and <*> each have word alternatives, fmap and ap.

I submitted this to the haskell libraries mailing list, but include it here for future reference.