[Haskell-cafe] For class Monoid; better names than mempty & mappend might have been: mid (mident) & mbinop

[Paul R]

Hi Café,

Thomas> I think (<>) is fairly uncontroversial because:
Thomas> (...)
Thomas> 2. It's abstract. i.e., no intended pronunciation

How can that be an advantage ? A text flow with unnamed (or
unpronounceable) symbols makes reading, understanding and remembering
harder, don't you think ? I really think any operator or symbol should
be intended (and even designed !) for pronunciation.

Some references state that the monoid binary operation is often named
"dot" or "times" in english. That does not mean the operator must be
`dot`, `times`, (<.>) or (<x>) but at least the doc should provide
a single, consistent and pronounceable name for it, whatever its
spelling.

Thomas> For this reason, I think a larger change would have to come with
Thomas> a larger library re-organization. Johan Tibell suggested
Thomas> something like that a while ago: instead of lots of little cuts
Thomas> (backwards incompatible changes), a working group of activists
Thomas> should redesign a whole new (incompatible) alternative set of
Thomas> core libraries.

This would be a great initiative, really !

-- 
  Paul