Re: Functor, Applicative, Monad, Foldable, Traversable instances for (, , ) a b

On 06.04.2017 05:15, Tony Morris wrote:

By "length" here I mean, the function whose name is lima echo november golf tango hotel. I truly do not care what it is called. Follow the types, and the types of the types.

In theory you are right. But in practice, even a programming language is more than grammar. The names make the vocabulary. There is good names and bad names for a function. Good names are the ones everyone uses. Programmers use several programming languages, and they want the names of analogue functions to be the same. They want to come to a new language and reuse their vocabulary without bad surprises, as much as possible. Here is a classic short story of Swiss writer Peter Bichsel about an old man, who decides to name a table a "carpet", a bed a "painting" etc. A Table is a Table http://www.barbarafaessler.com/files/BichselAtableisatable.pdf The outcome is the expected one...

On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 12:51 AM, Ben Franksen mailto:ben.franksen@online.de> wrote:

Am 01.04.2017 um 03:27 schrieb Tony Morris: > The length of ((,) a) is exactly one. Anything else is ridiculous. Try > arguing against that,

Half true: length for this type makes no sense at all since it is not a sequence. So there should be no length defined for it.

Just choose a different name.

Cheers Ben

-- Andreas Abel <>< Du bist der geliebte Mensch. Department of Computer Science and Engineering Chalmers and Gothenburg University, Sweden andreas.abel@gu.se http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~abela/