Functor, Applicative, Monad, Foldable, Traversable instances for (, , ) a b

[Andreas Abel]

On 06.04.2017 05:15, Tony Morris wrote:
> By "length" here I mean, the function whose name is lima echo november
> golf tango hotel. I truly do not care what it is called. Follow the
> types, and the types of the types.

In theory you are right.  But in practice, even a programming language 
is more than grammar.  The names make the vocabulary.  There is good 
names and bad names for a function.  Good names are the ones everyone 
uses.  Programmers use several programming languages, and they want the 
names of analogue functions to be the same.  They want to come to a new 
language and reuse their vocabulary without bad surprises, as much as 
possible.

Here is a classic short story of Swiss writer Peter Bichsel about an old 
man, who decides to name a table a "carpet", a bed a "painting" etc.

   A Table is a Table
   http://www.barbarafaessler.com/files/BichselAtableisatable.pdf

The outcome is the expected one...

> On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 12:51 AM, Ben Franksen <ben.franksen at online.de
> <mailto:ben.franksen at online.de>> wrote:
>
>     Am 01.04.2017 um 03:27 schrieb Tony Morris:
>     > The length of ((,) a) is exactly one. Anything else is ridiculous. Try
>     > arguing against that,
>
>     Half true: length for this type makes no sense at all since it is not a
>     sequence. So there should be no length defined for it.
>
>     Just choose a different name.
>
>     Cheers
>     Ben

-- 
Andreas Abel  <><      Du bist der geliebte Mensch.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Chalmers and Gothenburg University, Sweden

andreas.abel at gu.se
http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~abela/