[Haskell-cafe] Re: Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[mail at justinbogner.com]

John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org> writes:
> Wikipedia's first sentence about monoids is:
>
>   In abstract algebra, a branch of mathematics, a monoid is an algebraic
>   structure with a single, associative binary operation and an identity
>   element.
>
> Which is *not* intuitive to someone that comes from a background in....
>  any other programming language.
>

Instead of Wikipedia, why not try a dictionary? Looking up monoid using
dictionary.com:

  An operator * and a value x form a monoid if * is
  associative and x is its left and right identity.

On the other hand, appendable doesn't seem to be a word, and while you
can infer that it means "something that can be appended to", that's only
half of the story...