Proposal #3339: Add (+>) as a synonym for mappend

[Yitzchak Gale]

It has been pointed out to me that my previous message in this
thread could be interpreted as having personal overtones.
Given my strident tone in the rest of this thread that is
understandable, but it really wasn't my intention. I apologize
if anyone took offense from that or any other of my posts.

There is obviously a consensus in the community to make this change,
and so be it. Johan is a top professional; I commend his work and all
others who have contributed to this thread. We all share the common
goal of improving Haskell.

Now let me repost my previous message, with a bit of commentary
to ensure that it is interpreted in a strictly objective light:

Conor McBride wrote:
>> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DefaultSuperclassInstances
>> I don't know if it's likely to be implemented in GHC anytime soon,..
>> So things are looking up. It should soon be technically feasible to
>> separate the issues of whether the Monoid operator should be (<>) and
>> whether it should actually live in a Semigroup superclass...

I wrote:
> Nice. But will it be happening soon, or not? And how soon is soon?
> It looks like Johan will soon be committing a disruptive change
> that will break many packages.

Edward mentioned that about 20 of his packages will break.
For me, a good deal of my professional work for the past half year
will break. There may be other breakage as well. Even though
it is not very difficult to fix any individual broken package, I think
it is fair to call that disruptive.

> Is it necessary for the semigroups
> package to change the name of <> in order to make it
> possible to fix the broken packages in a reasonable way, or will this
> better facility likely become available within approximately the same
> time frame as the breaking change?

It would be great if Conor's new feature gets implemented around
the same time as the change. Then the damage would be minimal;
we can just hold back some package versions for a short while, and
everything will eventually sort itself out.

But if not, it would be good if the name of <> in Data.Semigroup were
changed to something else before Johan's change propagates. That
would make the required fixes a lot less messy.

Perhaps the original suggestion, "+>", is a candidate?

Sebastian Fischer wrote:
> Why aren't proper imports (as mentioned earlier by Johan) enough
> to let both versions of <> coexist?

They can only coexist if you do some messy manual renaming
in each module. Using a non-standard name is confusing and
makes the code less readable and less maintainable. Re-using the
standard name in non-standard ways makes the code fragile and
creates confusing error messages.

If we change the name of <> to +> (or something) in semigroups,
at least the situation will be no worse than for "pure" in
Applicative vs. "return" in Monad.

Thanks,
Yitz