[Haskell-cafe] What's the advantage of writing Haskell this way?

[Lyndon Maydwell]

I just tried to use the generic form with (Maybe a) and 'mconcat'
prevented this from working, so that needs to be considered too.

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 10:53 PM, Casey McCann <syntaxglitch at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 9:01 AM, John Ky <newhoggy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> instance Monoid (Stream a) where
>>     mempty = Chunks mempty
>>     mappend (Chunks xs) (Chunks ys) = Chunks (xs ++ ys)
>>     mappend _ _ = EOF
>>
>> I guess, it shows my lack of experience in Haskell, but my question is, why
>> is writing the code this way preferred over say writing it like this:
>
> I don't care for the inconsistency in this example, using both mempty
> and (++). Your version is at least consistent, but I'd actually prefer
> to use mappend instead of (++) here, because it makes it clear that
> this isn't actually defining a "new" Monoid instance, just translating
> an existing instance for the constructor parameter to work for the
> surrounding data type.
>
> - C.
>
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