Proposal: Make Semigroup as a superclass of Monoid

[David Feuer]

Wouldn't your concerns about NonEmpty be addressed by keeping its type
abstract? Then something like Liquid Haskell could be used to define it
better.
On May 4, 2015 10:19 AM, "Reid Barton" <rwbarton at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 8:20 AM, Jeremy <voldermort at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The proposal to make Semigroup a superclass of Monoid was discussed a
>> while
>> ago [1], and the conclusion was to "put this off until the dust has
>> settled
>> from the AMP and FT changes".
>>
>> Now that 7.10 is out, I would like to re-propose. The proposed plan is
>> similar to AMP, but less invasive, as (in my subjective experience)
>> user-defined Monoids are much less common than user-defined Monads.
>>
>> 1. GHC 7.12 will include Semigroup and NonEmpty in base. All Monoid
>> instances, and anything else which forms a Semigroup, will have a
>> Semigroup
>> instance. GHC will issue a warning when it encounters an instance of
>> Monoid
>> which is not an instance of Semigroup.
>>
>
> Strongly opposed to adding a NonEmpty type to base. It's a step in the
> wrong direction:
> the problem it clumsily tries to address is solved much better by
> refinement types à la
> LiquidHaskell, which handles this and other whole classes of problems at
> once.
>
> Now, we don't have LiquidHaskell in GHC yet; but let's not settle for
> adding a NonEmpty
> type that we know is an inferior approach to base now, when it will likely
> be very hard
> to remove it in the future.
>
> I know there are some who use NonEmpty types currently, but I think their
> needs are
> just as well (if not better) met by putting the type in a small package
> outside of base
> with few dependencies.
>
>
>>
>> 2. GHC >7.12 will define Monoid as a subclass of Semigroup.
>>
>
> While it frustrates me to repeatedly see so much time spent by both GHC
> developers
> and Haskell library and application programmers on changes like this with
> fairly small
> upside, I don't have any fundamental objection to ending up in a state
> with Semigroup
> as a superclass of Monoid.
>
> Regards,
> Reid Barton
>
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