The only build systems that I'm aware of that are monadic are redo, SCons and Shake-inspired build systems (including Shake itself, Jenga in OCaml, and several

The only build systems that I'm aware of that are monadic are redo, SCons and Shake-inspired build systems (including Shake itself, Jenga in OCaml, and several Haskell alternatives). One realistic example (from the original Shake paper), is building a .tar file from the list of files contained in a file. Using Shake we can write the Action: contents <- readFileLines "list.txt" need contents cmd "tar -cf" [out] contents There are at least two aspects I'm aware of that increase the power of Make: - Using `$(shell cat list.txt)` I can splice the contents of list.txt into the Makefile, reading the contents of list.txt before the dependencies are parsed. - Using `-include file.d` I can include additional rules that are themselves produced by the build system. It seems every "applicative" build system contains some mechanism for extending its power. I believe some are strictly less powerful than monadic systems, while others may turn out to be an encoding of monadic rules. However, I think that an explicitly monadic definition provides a clearer foundation. http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2014/07/applicative-vs-monadic-build-systems.html http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2014/07/applicative-vs-mona...