hi guys, I was just wondering if anyone is interested is a "quasi"-project of rewriting the Prelude (only shrinking it as measured by the total number of names imported, read along...) the idea is (just to be substantially different in approach) to develop an "alternate history" of Haskell. take map for example, and fmap, I don't think they should be named different (fmap is ugly, not suggestive, and conceptually the same). mplus could be renamed (++) (they are conceptually the same, mzero looks odd, name it empty, or simply zero) although I think concat should be replaced by msum (or the other way around preferably :) ? msum is a bad name) I am somewhat confused by join. concat seems to match join's type but I don't think the ideas coincide. and so on. in particular, we would want: * no backwards compatibility. the Prelude as is it, is good enough. we are defining a new module. * clean categorical hierarchy of type classes (category theorists wanted!) promoting uniformity. * cleaner names. foldl1 means nothing. absolutely nothing. what's the 1 for? * our Prelude only contains typeclasses, datatypes, and functions of utmost conceptual (and semantic, such as error, undefined and seq) importance, everything else goes to other modules. our Prelude is not going to be a place for "convenient" declarations. * the suffix method of naming (liftM2) is considered messy. we would prefer a seperate module (promoting qualified import). this is a fun project. we will not rewrite the Prelude, we'll merely rename it. I would suggest the name TheOtherPrelude to make our intentions clear. the conveniences (like concatMap) goes to TheOtherPrelude.Extension. I suggest we do it on the wiki. anyone interested just open a page with your name of choice. I am not doing it only because there's no point doing it if no one's interested. cheers, Imam __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com