Bikeshedding at its finest. I think if we are very lucky, then a long time from now we will be able to deprecate "return" in favor of "Control.Applicative.pure"

As for making it "invisible", that's what idiom brackets and monad comprehensions are for. But for those creating an *instance* of Monad, well, we obviously need to be able to refer to which operation we are implementing.

I like the idea of using "lift", because this is the word used for MonadTrans, which is the same operation, but in the category of Haskell Monads instead of the category of Hask. However, it is convenient to have both in scope unqualified, so maybe lift would not be the best choice.

-- Dan Burton