[Haskell-cafe] Linguistic hair-splitting

[Conal Elliott]

I don't like this bias toward singling out Monad among all of the type
classes, thereby perpetuating the misleading mystique surrounding Monad.  If
you're going to call [3,5,8] "a monadic value", then please give equal time
to other type classes by also calling [3,5,8] "a functorial value"
("functorific"?), "an applicative value", "a monoidal value", "a foldable
value" ("foldalicious"?), "a traversable value", "a numeric value" (see the
applicative-numbers package), etc.  Similarly when referring to values of
other types that happen to be monads as well as other type classes.

   - Conal

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 12:17 PM, Jochem Berndsen <jochem at functor.nl> wrote:

> Luke Palmer wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Jochem Berndsen <jochem at functor.nl>
> wrote:
> >>> Now, here's the question: Is is correct to say that [3, 5, 8] is a
> >>> monad?
> >> In what sense would this be a monad? I don't quite get your question.
> >
> > I think the question is this:  if m is a monad, then what do you call
> > a thing of type m Int, or m Whatever.
>
> Ah yes, I see. It's probably the most common to call this a "monadic
> value" or "monadic action". As Daniel pointed out, the type constructor
> itself is called a "monad" (e.g., Maybe).
>
> Jochem
>
> --
> Jochem Berndsen | jochem at functor.nl
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20100130/b4bc2131/attachment.html