States and exceptions are dual effects

Jean-Guillaume Dumas (1) , Dominique Duval (1) , Laurent Fousse (1) , Jean-Claude Reynaud (2)

1 LJK - Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann
2 RC - Reynaud Consulting

Global states and exceptions form two basic computational effects. In this paper it is proved that they can be seen as dual to each other: the lookup and update operations for global states are dual to the raise and handle operations for exceptions, respectively. In order to get this result we use a monad for exceptions and a comonad for global states.

Domaines: Logique en informatique [cs.LO]; Catégories et ensembles [math.CT]

Jean-Guillaume Dumas, Dominique Duval, Laurent Fousse, Jean-Claude Reynaud. States and exceptions are dual effects. 2010. ⟨hal-00445873v1⟩