On 8/08/2013, at 2:09 AM, damodar kulkarni wrote:
Thanks for pointing this out, I was not able to point my thoughts in this direction.
But I still have a doubt: if my familiarity doesn't come in the form of some "analogy", then my acquired intuition about "it" would be of little use. In fact, it may well be misleading. Am I correct?
Very much so. This is why I despise, detest, and loathe as abominations programming languages in which string concatenation is written "+". (If you want a binary operation which is associative and has an identity but doesn't commute, the product lies ready to hand, and the repeated product (exponentiation) is actually _useful_ for strings. It's still better to use a non-arithmetic operator, as PL/I, Fortran, Ada, and Haskell do.)
If so, the best we can hope is the name-giver to describe, as explicitly as possible, the "analogy" (sort of a thought process) he/she had had in his/her mind while giving a particular name to a given concept?
Complete agreement from me. For what it's worth, "return" can mean "to shift back to a previous topic", so it's not _that_ crazy for when you've switched from a monadic context to a pure context and are now switching back.