How to read arrow combinators

Arrows, like monads and applicative functors, express computations that happen within a context. In Haskell, arrows are represented with a constructor class Arrow:

class Arrow a where
  arr :: (b -> c) -> a b c
  -- Each function may be treated as a computation.

  (>>>) :: a b c -> a c d -> a b d
  -- Computations may be composed, by connecting the output of the first to the input of the second.

  first :: a b c -> a (b,d) (c,d)
  -- A computation may be applied to part of the input, with the rest copied through to the output.
  ...

As usual, it takes some time to comprehend what arrow is and why and how it is useful. If you are looking for a good arrow tutorial, I strongly recommend John Hughes’s Programming with Arrows.

However, it is not necessary to understand arrow just to read some code written with arrow combinators because arrows are often used even when there is no compelling reason to do so. (->) is an instance of Arrow and some Haskell programmers just prefer arrow style even though combinators of Data.Bifunctor are often more readable.

instance Arrow (->) where
    arr f = f
    (***) f g ~(x,y) = (f x, g y)

So here is my tip. If you encounter code written with arrow combinators in the context of (->), use the following translation table to decode what the code means.

In case of second and right, we can also use fmap because both (,) and Either is functorial on the second type. But I personally don’t recommend fmap in this case because these types arbitrarily map the second type instead of the first one.