On 2009 Jan 22, at 10:09, Andrew Wagner wrote:
See, that's the kind of name we need! StructureWithAssociativeOperationAndIdentity -- make both the mathematicians AND the non-mathematicians mad!
"SimpleArithmetic" (you have "numbers" and a single "arithmetic operation" on them). You can play similar games with the mathematical concepts of groups and rings. (But you get into trouble with magmas and semigroups.)
In any case, my response to bikeshedding these days is to present a fait accompli so people can just get stuff done instead of waiting for many-legs-and-no-brain (otherwise known as a committee) to do something. The math terms have at least the advantage of already being well defined. Yes, this means you get to learn some abstract math --- but then, you're going to be faced with that the first time you encounter (or need!) type-level Peano numbers anyway. Or fix/mfix ("least defined fixed point").