[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: Why the Prelude must die

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> > Regarding type variable naming, a few of my more hardware minded
> > friends I've asked to try Haskell often tease me about the opaque type
> > variable names in the Prelude--it seems greater consideration of type
> > variable names in the Prelude might behoove new users.
>
> I think that single letter names are very a good idea for most of the things
> in the Prelude. 'a', 'b' etc. are good for very general things like the
> basic classes (Eq, Num, etc) and for parametric functions (flip, (.), etc).
> I also like the 'm' for Monads of all kinds, but I would suggest to
> use 'mt' for monad transformers. For collections I think 'c' is nice
> and 'k' for keys seems to be sort of standard, but I would like to propose
> using 'e' as generic name for elements of collections, if there are more
> element types, then 'e1', e2' etc.

Looking through the Hoogle logs, if people search for a multi-letter
type name, they are usually getting the wrong end of the stick. People
often search for:

char -> bool

I don't think there is anything wrong with single letter type names,
unless you are making your types too complex.

Thanks

Neil