[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Henning Thielemann]

John Goerzen schrieb:

> Though if all we're talking about is naming, I would still maintain that
> newbie-friendly naming is a win.  We can always say "HEY MATHEMETICIANS:
> APPENDABLE MEANS MONOID" in the haddock docs ;-)

We already have a problem with this:
Haskell 98 uses intuitive names for the numeric type classes.
It introduces new names, which do not match the names of common
algebraic structures.
Why is a type Num (numeric?), whenever it supports number literals, (+)
and (*)? Why not just number literals? Why not also division?
The numeric type hierarchy of Haskell must be learned anyway,
but the user learns terms he cannot use outside the Haskell world.
Ring and Field are harder to learn first, but known and precise terms.
(And if you don't like to learn the names, just write functions without
signatures and let GHCi find out the signatures with the appropriate
class constraints.)