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
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