Hi Adam, Thank you for an interesting thought; an invisible name might actually be on of the better solutions, although you are right in that your suggestion is a bit too open for my current project.
Actually, I believe that naming is very important. My goal is to have the
"average programmer" (i.e. someone without a post-bachelor degree) look at the
code and get an intuitive feel of what is going on. So in reply to Jerzy, I do
want to encourage the discussion in the "Noble Domain of Philosophy" and I also
want to repeat that I am not proposing to change Haskell or Haskell libraries
(I am working with another language altogether), so don't fear ;)
- Jurriën
On 6 Aug 2013, at 10:46, Adam Gundry <adam.gun...@strath.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 06/08/13 06:14, J. Stutterheim wrote:
>> Suppose we now have the opportunity to change the name of the
>> `return` function in Monad, what would be a "better" name for it?
>> (for some definition of better)
>
> Rather than proposing a different name, I'm going to challenge the
> premise of your question. Perhaps it would be better if `return` had no
> name at all. Consider the following:
>
> return f `ap` s `ap` t
>
> f <$> s <*> t
>
> do { sv <- s
> ; tv <- t
> ; return (f sv tv) }
>
> These are all different ways of spelling
>
> f s t
>
> plus the necessary applicative or monadic bureaucracy. But why couldn't
> we write just the plain application, and let the type system deal with
> the plumbing of effects?
>
> I realise that this may be too open a research area for your project...
>
>
>> N.B. I am _not_ proposing that we actually change the name of
>> `return`. I do currently have the opportunity to pick names for
>> common functions in a non-Haskell related project, so I was wondering
>> if there perhaps is a better name for `return`.
>
> I don't think the choice of name matters. I do think it should be short.
> Preferably invisible.
>
> Adam
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