[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Jonathan Cast]

On Tue, 2009-01-20 at 23:41 +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, John Goerzen wrote:
> 
> >  One thing that does annoy me about Haskell- naming. Say you've
> >  noticed a common pattern, a lot of data structures are similar to
> >  the difference list I described above, in that they have an empty
> >  state and the ability to append things onto the end. Now, for
> >  various reasons, you want to give this pattern a name using on
> >  Haskell's tools for expressing common idioms as general patterns
> >  (type classes, in this case). What name do you give it? I'd be
> >  inclined to call it something like "Appendable". But no, Haskell
> >  calls this pattern a "Monoid".
> 
> I risk to repeat someones point, since I have not read the entire thread 
> ... What I don't like about the Monoid class is, that its members are 
> named "mempty" and "mappend". It may be either (also respecting 
> qualified import)
>    Monoid(identity, op)

+1

If we're going to change any names in the standard library at all, this
is the change we should make.

jcc