Haskellers tend to use uninformative single-letter type variables. A case in point: Megaparsec> :i ParsecT type role ParsecT nominal nominal representational representational newtype ParsecT e s (m :: * -> *) a ... I've gotten used to the conventions that "a" stands for anything and "m" stands for monad -- but without digging into the code it wasn't initially obvious to me whether "s" stood for stream or state. Single-letter type variables don't seem to always be the standard, though: Megaparsec> :i between between :: Applicative m => m open -> m close -> m a -> m a -- Defined in ‘Control.Applicative.Combinators’ My questions are: (1) Are the brevity gains worth the confusion costs? (2) If I'm looking at a new library for the first time and trying to figure out what a type variable stands for, is there a canonical way to do it? Flailing through documentation at random? Unifying types by hand? -- Jeff Brown | Jeffrey Benjamin Brown Website https://msu.edu/~brown202/ | Facebook https://www.facebook.com/mejeff.younotjeff | LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybenjaminbrown(spammy, so I often miss messages here) | Github https://github.com/jeffreybenjaminbrown