so the main issues are these: Bulat Ziganshin raised: Num is intrinsically bound to the compiler. sad. so let's leave Num out. this basically means we will avoid "abstract algebra" in general. that is, forget "groups", "rings", for now, the principle focus will be "functor", "monad"... Henning Thielemann provided links to CAL: hi Henning, would you mind if we "steal" some of the good looking names in your Prelude? Brian Hulley raised one serious issue: even if we were to define a "newbie" friendly Prelude, which should be preferred, alphanumeric names or operators? I have a thing for operators, they look good! but Brian's issue is solid, the precedence isn't documented by Haddock. any Haddock developer reading this? so mplus stays. I would still suggest plus/zero over mplus/zero but Haskell's scoping is rather liberal. I suggest the convention that Control.Monad is always imported as M. this would mean we use M.plus, M.zero, M.lift and so on. Diego Navarro said: this will confuse beginners. I disagree. I think type classes and monads are the basics of Haskell (before that, it's just commonsense ;)... ) so if the error message successfully conveys the message that there's a problem, that should be enough to inspire the beginner to start on the basics. besides, people will ultimately use the standard Prelude. what I am trying to do is to prove that with a good choice of names programs written in Haskell can look more "comprehensible" to beginners. like Gosling said about Java, the language syntax has one very good property: it's easy to read it. Garrett Morris seems to agree with me on this. Greg Fitzgerald raised the further issue of monads being overlooked by the beginners. I think "do notation considered harmful" blog was at least partially right: it's better to expose the concept rather than hiding it. so with enough people interested (I assume) it's time to move this discussion to the wiki. the wiki code is not to be taken seriously, it's a "proof-of-concept", a "guideline". cheers! Imam __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com