warning: rambling ahead... Perhaps this was obvious to everyone else but I've just come to realise it over the past couple days as I've been doing more refactoring work on Cabal and cabal-install's command line handling. There are basically two kinds of command line flags, ones that represent a singular piece of information like: --enable-foo --disable-foo --enable-foo --disable-foo No matter how many times one uses those kinds of flags, they just set or reset a single piece of information, in this case a boolean. It doesn't just have to be a boolean of course: --user --global --package-db=specific.package.conf is a flag of type PackageDB. Then there are command line flags that represent a set or sequence of information, like: --ghc-option=this --ghc-option=that --ghc-option=theother which represents ["this", "that", "theother"]. Lists are of course also monoids. So we get the list kind of flag monoid for free and the other is the Last monoid. Unfortunately it's only in Data.Monoid as of base-3.0, but it's easy to define a copy: data Flag a = Flag a | Default instance Functor Flag where fmap f (Flag x) = Flag (f x) fmap _ Default = Default instance Monoid (Flag a) where mempty = Default _ `mappend` f@(Flag _) = f f `mappend` Default = f flagOrDefault default (Flag x) = x flagOrDefault default Default = default So a command usually takes a collection of specific kinds of flags. If all of these flags are themselves monoids then the overall collection is also a monoid, defined pointwise: data ConfigFlags = ConfigFlags { foo :: Flag Bool, bar :: Flag PackageDB, baz :: [String] } instance Monoid ConfigFlags where mempty = ConfigFlags mempty mempty mempty a `mappend` b = ConfigFlags (foo a `mappend` foo b) (bar a `mappend` bar b) (baz a `mappend` baz b) This is really useful because it means we can combine flags from several sources, from defaults and override it with command line flags or setting read from config files. The latter is particularly useful for cabal-install which has a config file where users can override defaults. So I'll try converting all the flags types to this Monoid style. Duncan