Andrew Coppin wrote:
->
"to"
<-
"from", or "drawn from" for list comprehensions.
[]
"nil"
More curiosely, that (>>=) function. Why is the Haskell name for it (>>=), and why is it pronounced "bind"? Neither of these choices make a lot of sense to me...
(>>=) is chosen as it seems fairly nice when you use a sugar free monadic style, foo x >>= \y -> bar y >>= \z -> return (y+z) To understand why it's called "bind" look at common sugar for it, e.g. the above using do-notation and a "let" notation (e.g. monadic- or ]administrative- (A-)normal form): do y <- foo x z <- bar y return (y+z) letM y = foo x in letM z = bar y in y + z So the effect of (>>=) is to bind the value produced by a monadic computation to some variable. If we view impure languages as implicitly using a monad, their "let" statements (which bind variables to values) translate to exactly the above.