[Solved]-Define scalaz monad instance for a shapeless hlist-scala

A monoid is a set with some operations that obey particular laws. What elements are you considering as possible HListM[A]? If you declare HListM[A] = HList, i.e. any HList, then you'll quickly find that you can't map with f: A => B, except by treating all maps as identity and you've reinvented the rather uninteresting monad Id (with a few extra but inert inhabitants).

We could make a monad with the type HListM[A] = A :: ... :: A :: HNil (though even actually expressing that type in Scala is a challenge - you'd need an auxiliary trait trait CopiesOf[N <: Nat, A] {type Out <: HList}, implicits to provide instances of this, and then an existential to actually write it (CopiesOf[N, A]#Out forSome {type N <: Nat})). Writing monad operations for this is possible, though you'd need to require shapeless auxiliary classes like Prepend at the point of operation, since there's no real way to express a "forall" type in Scala - you can declare instances of your type for _0 and Succ[N], but there's no way to prove to the compiler that there is an instance for any N <: Nat, you just have to require implicit ones whenever you need to use them.

But after a lot of work you'd end up with something isomorphic to List[A]; why not just use List[A] for that case?