Re: [Haskell-cafe] Alternative name for return

very insightful, thx Jerzy. imho, this is a good reason not to use already known words like lift,return,inject,pure etc. while still using the word Monad. (this is something that bothered me for years.) no one -of those who say "no one"- does understand Monads because it does not explain itself nor suggest its utility, while the other words probably tend to cause a very false sense of understanding. so, long talk few suggestions.... if it should be about Monads as a concept, i'd suggest 1) "unit" and "counit" for Monads and Comonads. (this is my personal favorite choice, probably because i did learn to understand Monads by reading a paper about Comonads.) if it should be more selfexplaining for the average coder, then 2) let,set,put,be,:= or "return allowed only at end of script - use let anywhere else" for ScriptLike (aka Monad) as a strict version of return, i'd suggest something that may somehow fit into 1 and 2: 3) eval = Control.Exception.evaluate :: a -> IO a regards - marc

Gesendet: Dienstag, 06. August 2013 um 11:43 Uhr Von: "Jerzy Karczmarczuk" An: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Betreff: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Alternative name for return

Le 06/08/2013 11:01, J. Stutterheim a écrit :

...

... So in reply to Jerzy, I do want to encourage the discussion in the "Noble Domain of Philosophy" and I also want to repeat that I am not proposing to change Haskell or Haskell libraries

Jurriën, I taught Haskell for several years. I saw the disgraceful confusion in heads of my students whose previous programming experience was based on Python, and who learned Haskell and Java in parallel. So, I won't claim that names are irrelevant. And "return" in particular.

However, my personal "philosophy" is the following: accept the fact that words in one language -- formal or natural -- mean something different than in another one. [[In French the word "file" in computerese is "queue" in English; this is in fact a French word meaning "tail" in English, and I have several dozens of such examples... And so what?...]]

It is good to choose consciously some good names while elaborating a standard. But getting back to it after several years, is -- for me -- a waste of time. This, unfortunately, pollutes the true philosophy as well. I believe that at least 80% of the "progress" in the philosophy of religions belongs to the linguistic domain.

The anglosaxons corupted the word "semantics", used in a pejorative sense: "discussion about superficialities, the words, not the concepts", while the true semantics is about the true sense.

So, sorry for being sarcastic, or even cynical in my previous post, but I sincerely think that oldies are oldies, let them be, and work more on issues that are still evolving.

All the best.

Jerzy

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