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

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 9:04 AM, wrote:

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...

Monoid isn't something I came across and didn't understand, its something I should have been using for a long time before I discovered it. But it never jumped out at me when I was browsing the library documentation tree.