Re: [Haskell-cafe] Linguistic hair-splitting

I don't like this bias toward singling out Monad among all of the type classes, thereby perpetuating the misleading mystique surrounding Monad. If you're going to call [3,5,8] "a monadic value", then please give equal time to other type classes by also calling [3,5,8] "a functorial value" ("functorific"?), "an applicative value", "a monoidal value", "a foldable value" ("foldalicious"?), "a traversable value", "a numeric value" (see the applicative-numbers package), etc. Similarly when referring to values of other types that happen to be monads as well as other type classes. - Conal On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 12:17 PM, Jochem Berndsen wrote:

Luke Palmer wrote:

...

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Jochem Berndsen wrote:

...

...

Now, here's the question: Is is correct to say that [3, 5, 8] is a monad? In what sense would this be a monad? I don't quite get your question.

I think the question is this: if m is a monad, then what do you call a thing of type m Int, or m Whatever.

Ah yes, I see. It's probably the most common to call this a "monadic value" or "monadic action". As Daniel pointed out, the type constructor itself is called a "monad" (e.g., Maybe).

Jochem

-- Jochem Berndsen | jochem@functor.nl _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe