Magnus Therning wrote:
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcop...@btinternet.com> wrote:
A class that represents "any possible thing that can technically
be considered a monoid" seems so absurdly general as to be almost useless.
If you don't know what an operator *does*, being able to abstract over it
isn't especially helpful...
But can't you say exactly the same about Monads?
I know nothing about how mathematicians use monads. However, Haskell
uses them in one specific way: for controlling (not necessarily
_sequencing_) statement execution. This is a fairly rigidly-defined notion.
By contrast, Integer forms an infinite family of different monoids, yet
it can have only a single Monoid instance...
I notice that there's a an Alternative class, which is isomorphic to
Monoid, but rather than being some arbitrary monoid, it's a monoid with
a specific meaning. This, I would argue, is far more useful.
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