A *(term) taken from _(category theory) and applied to _(functional) programming concepts to provide a way to deal with <em>local</em>, single-thread state in a functional language without having to pass the state around explicitly as extra arguments to all the functions that deal with it (and requiring changing their signatures, etc.) See also _(Eugenio Moggi) and a _(Learning Lounge) course, _(Monads 101).

<ul class="links">
<li>The FOLDOC _(entry| http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=monad).
<li>A recent, in-depth, seemingly practical _(tutorial| http://www.nomaware.com/monads/html/).
<li>_(Monads| http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~walton/monads.html), a collection of references to literature about monads (mostly computer science) by _(Lisa Walton| http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~walton/).
<li>About optimizing certain kinds of monads, see the work of _(Jonathan Sobel| http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/).
</ul>