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

[David Fox]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 9:04 AM, <mail at justinbogner.com> wrote:

> 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...
>
>
> Monoid isn't something I came across and didn't understand, its something
I should have been using for a long time before I discovered it.  But it
never jumped out at me when I was browsing the library documentation tree.
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