[Haskell-cafe] Monoid wants a (++) equivalent

Thomas Schilling nominolo at googlemail.com
Wed Jul 1 15:38:21 EDT 2009


2009/7/1 David Leimbach <leimy2k at gmail.com>
> I like this thinking as well.  I kind of wish Haskell didn't overload
> operators to begin with but oh well :-)
> Just because the compiler can figure out what I mean because it has a great
> type system, I might not be able to figure out what I mean a year from now
> if I see ++ everywhere.
> In some sense, I prefer misleading function names to overly overloaded
> operators.

Yep, had the same experience.  On the one hand, using monoids lets you
delay some design decisions for later and lets you reuse more library
code.  On the other hand, it sometimes makes it really hard to see
what the code is actually doing--especially if you use more than one
monoid.

For this reason on of the first advanced features I implemented in the
(yet unreleased) scion IDE library allows you to look up the
instantiated type of an identifier.  Unfortunately, jumping to the
definition (or documentation) of the monoid instance is a bit more
difficult.  Haddock should allow documentation on instance
declarations...


> Dave
>
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-- 
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