[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[David Menendez]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Ross Mellgren <rmm-haskell at z.odi.ac> wrote:
>
> Usually when encountering something like "Monoid" (if I didn't already know
> it), I'd look it up in the library docs. The problem I've had with this
> tactic is twofold:
>
> First, the docs for the typeclass usually don't give any practical examples,
> so sometimes it's hard to be sure that the "append" in "mappend" means what
> you think it means.

The documentation for Monoid is embarrassingly brief.

"The monoid class. A minimal complete definition must supply mempty
and mappend, and these should satisfy the monoid laws."

It doesn't even list the monoid laws!

> Second is that there appears to be no way to document an _instance_. It
> would be really handy if there were even a single line under "Instances >
> Monoid ([] a)" that explained how the type class was implemented for the
> list type. As it is, if you know what a Monoid is already, it's easy to
> figure out how it would be implemented.

Not necessarily. Any instance of MonadPlus (or Alternative) has at
least two reasonable Monoid instances: (mplus, mzero) and (liftM2
mappend, return mempty). [] uses the first and Maybe uses the second.

I recommend not creating direct instances of Monoid for this reason.
If you want to use Monoid with Int, you have to use Sum Int or Product
Int.

-- 
Dave Menendez <dave at zednenem.com>
<http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>