[Haskell-cafe] Re: Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

John Goerzen writes:

Wikipedia's first sentence about monoids is:

In abstract algebra, a branch of mathematics, a monoid is an algebraic structure with a single, associative binary operation and an identity element.

Which is *not* intuitive to someone that comes from a background in.... any other programming language.

Instead of Wikipedia, why not try a dictionary? Looking up monoid using dictionary.com: An operator * and a value x form a monoid if * is associative and x is its left and right identity. On the other hand, appendable doesn't seem to be a word, and while you can infer that it means "something that can be appended to", that's only half of the story...