> If you're learning Haskell, which communicates the idea more clearly: > > * Appendable > > or > > * Monoid > > I can immediately figure out what the first one means. With the second, > I could refer to the GHC documentation, which does not describe what a > Monoid does. Or read a wikipedia article about a branch of mathematics > and try to figure out how it applies to Haskell.
However, "Appendable" carries baggage with it which is highly misleading. Consider, for instance, the monoid of rational numbers under multiplication (which, by the way, is quite useful with the writer transformed list monad for dealing with probabilities) -- you can claim that multiplication here is a sort of "appending", perhaps, but it's not really appropriate. Modular addition, or multiplication in some group is even farther from it. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
