[Haskell-cafe] Why monoids will abide...

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2009 Jan 22, at 10:09, Andrew Wagner wrote:
> See, that's the kind of name we need!  
> StructureWithAssociativeOperationAndIdentity -- make both the  
> mathematicians AND the non-mathematicians mad!

"SimpleArithmetic" (you have "numbers" and a single "arithmetic  
operation" on them).  You can play similar games with the mathematical  
concepts of groups and rings.  (But you get into trouble with magmas  
and semigroups.)

In any case, my response to bikeshedding these days is to present a  
fait accompli so people can just get stuff done instead of waiting for  
many-legs-and-no-brain (otherwise known as a committee) to do  
something.  The math terms have at least the advantage of already  
being well defined.  Yes, this means you get to learn some abstract  
math --- but then, you're going to be faced with that the first time  
you encounter (or need!) type-level Peano numbers anyway.  Or fix/mfix  
("least defined fixed point").

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH


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