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

August Sodora augsod at gmail.com
Mon Jul 25 16:17:18 CEST 2011


I like to take a leaf out of Prince's book and refer to it as "the
function formerly known as mappend"

August Sodora
augsod at gmail.com
(201) 280-8138



On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 3:22 AM, Paul R <paul.r.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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