It's indeed arbitrary. Other common names are Inl and Inr (presumably standing for "inject left/right"). Some Haskell project do indeed use a more specific name. The advantage of using the generic Left/Right is reusability of library code. The particular name of the datatype and its constructors are competely arbitrary. The use of "Right" for "Success" is a handy pun -- the program returned "the right answer".
HTH, / Thomas On 27 May 2010 15:25, Ionut G. Stan <ionut.g.s...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I was just wondering if there's any particular reason for which the two > constructors of the Either data type are named Left and Right. I'm thinking > that something like Success | Failure or Right | Wrong would have been a > little better. > > I've recently seen that Scala uses a similar convention for some error > notifications so I'm starting to believe there's more background behind it > than just an unfortunate naming. > > Thanks, > -- > Ionuț G. Stan | http://igstan.ro > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > -- Push the envelope. Watch it bend. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
