On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Bryan O'Sullivan <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 9:50 AM, David Leimbach <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I actually worry that this will make people think, more incorrectly, that >> Monoids are about appending stuff only. >> > > I think that adding a graphical operator as a synonym for mappend would > actually help to address that, since the magic word "append" would no longer > be nearly as common in source code, and that textual name certainly is > (unhelpfully) suggestive of a specific semantics. > Yeah the textual name doesn't help one bit. Much like "return" confuses folks in Monads. However, I think most people learn Haskell in stages where ++ is introduced as an append operation *before* they even come across the term "Monoid". I feel that though this may have a lesser degenerative impact on the newbie's ability to learn Monoids, that it still contributes to the confusion a bit. Then again, anyone who's had to deal with overloaded operators in any language should learn never to assume anything about overloaded operators... Dave
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