Re: Proposal: Make Semigroup as a superclass of Monoid

Greg, the proposal is for Semigroup s => Monoid s, not for Monoid s => Semigroup s , which is what i believe you're reading the proposal to say. a large number of statistical aggregatory and analytical data structures are semigroups but emphatically not monoids because they lack the notion of a zero element! over the past 8 months alone i've probably 5-10 different data structures for statistical ingestion that were semigroups but not monoids. point being, semigroups are well defined mathematical objects, and i deal with many many things that are semigroups and not monoids, especially in data analysis application domains. I can provide a few example later this week if you want. On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 8:33 PM, Greg Weber wrote:

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1. GHC 7.12 will include Semigroup and NonEmpty in base. All Monoid instances, and anything else which forms a Semigroup, will have a Semigroup instance. GHC will issue a warning when it encounters an instance of Monoid which is not an instance of Semigroup.

There is going to be some push-back on this proposal from those that point out the lack of mempty makes Semigroup less rigorous that a Monoid. That concept can create a debate around what is "anything else which forms a semigroup". I would try to amend the proposal to something much more specific. Here is how I have used Semigroup

1) a structure that is already a Monoid 2) a structure that is a non-empty form of a Monoid 3) a structure where mempty is not constant but a function of the element you would concatenate it to

An example of 3) is concatenating bounding boxes. A zeroed box is certainly an empty box, but it will create a larger box when concatenated with an existing box.The identity concatenation of the current bounding box is always the current bounding box.

What other structures do you use Semigroup for? Are there structures in base where there would be a debate about adding an instance? Can we come up with rules for when a Semigroup instance should be added to base?

On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 5:20 AM, Jeremy wrote:

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The proposal to make Semigroup a superclass of Monoid was discussed a while ago [1], and the conclusion was to "put this off until the dust has settled from the AMP and FT changes".

Now that 7.10 is out, I would like to re-propose. The proposed plan is similar to AMP, but less invasive, as (in my subjective experience) user-defined Monoids are much less common than user-defined Monads.

1. GHC 7.12 will include Semigroup and NonEmpty in base. All Monoid instances, and anything else which forms a Semigroup, will have a Semigroup instance. GHC will issue a warning when it encounters an instance of Monoid which is not an instance of Semigroup.

2. GHC >7.12 will define Monoid as a subclass of Semigroup.

Stage 2 could be delayed - or in the extreme case, cancelled - if the warnings following stage 1 indicate that the proposal would cause significant breakage of existing code, although this is not anticipated.

The rationale for this change is:

1. Semigroup is a popular package (this is relevant in combination with the following point). 2. Using an existing Monoid as a Semigroup requires redefining it (or WrappedMonoid), leading to much boilerplate and duplication. 3. NonEmpty is often redefined by beginners (or those who don't think it's worth having an extra dependency for).

[1] https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2013-June/020188.html

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