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

[Edward Kmett]

While I like the idea of (++) as mappend to some extent, two objections
immediately come to mind:
1.) While I like the appeal to the PVP to export a version of (++) from
Data.Monoid and I think this has worked out well for new modules like
Control.Category, I'm not sure that with a module that has been around for
so long as Data.Monoid can be so flippant about breaking any code that
imports it unqualified that also happens to use a list. Lists are everywhere
in Haskell, and unqualified imports do exist.

2.) There is also a pretty big caveat in that the choice of which operator
should be naturally selected for (++) _is_ ambiguous. Should it be mappend
or mplus?  Recall that in Haskell 1.4 (++) worked on MonadPlus and it was
changed in the great monomorphism revolution of '98.

-Edward Kmett

On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Henning Thielemann <
lemming at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:

>
> On Tue, 30 Jun 2009, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
>
>  I've thought for a while that it would be very nice indeed if the Monoid
>> class had a more
>> concise operator for infix appending than "a `mappend` b". I wonder if
>> other people are of a
>> similar opinion, and if so, whether this is worth submitting a libraries at proposal over.
>>
>
> We have the package version policy which relies on explicit or qualified
> imports, such that adding a function like (++) to Data.Monoid cannot harm
> any package that follow that policy. Thus I vote for not introducing a new
> operator, in order to keep the set of infix operators to memorize small, but
> use (++) for the generalized (List.++) aka mappend. The user would however
> need to hide (++) from Prelude.
>
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