[Haskell-cafe] replicateM should be called mreplicate?

[Thomas Davie]

On 7 Apr 2009, at 07:37, David Menendez wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Luke Palmer <lrpalmer at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 11:42 AM, David Menendez <dave at zednenem.com>  
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Of course, this suggests that mfix should be fixM, so perhaps a  
>>> better
>>> distinction is that mplus and mfix need to be defined per-monad,
>>> whereas filterM and replicateM are generic.
>>
>> Don't you think that is an incidental distinction, not an essential  
>> one?  It
>> would be like naming our favorite operations mbind and joinM, just  
>> because
>> of the way we happened to write the monad class.
>
> Fair enough. I only added that comment when I noticed that my
> explanation for picking replicateM over mreplicate also applied to
> mfix.
>
> Looking through Control.Monad, I see that all the *M functions require
> Monad, whereas the m* functions require MonadPlus (or MonadFix).

Actually, most of the *M functions only require Applicative – they're  
just written in a time when that wasn't in the libraries.

> I wonder to what extent that pattern holds in other libraries?

I'm not sure how to generalise this pattern, but it's probably worth  
noting that fmap is fmap, not mapF.  I can't see any pattern that it  
fits into, really I suspect it's a case of "what shall we name this"  
and not enough thought about consistant naming as the libraries evolved.

Bob