[Haskell-cafe] Generalizing (++) for monoids instead of using (<>)

After asking this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9963050/standard-way-of-joining-two-data-... I found out that the new infix operator for `mappend` is (<>). I'm wondering why ghc 7.4 didn't generalize (++) to work on monoids instead. To me, (++) is much more clear. (<>) means "not equal to" for me. Can anyone shed light on this decision? Adit -- adit.io