On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 7:56 PM, David Feuer
I think they're both wretched. return makes beginners think it's a control structure; pure just seems meaningless (I guess that's a slight improvement, arguably). I'd have gone for something like inject myself, but there's no way that's happening.
Just my $0.02: I wouldn't say `pure` is meaningless. It takes a value and turns it into a computation in the relevant computational context that performs no effects apart from yielding the given value. Computations whose only effect is yielding a single value are typically said to be pure computations in the Haskell community. It's a really nice name. `return`, on the other hand, is tremendously misleading for imperative programmers who won't understand why in the world anything after it isn't dead code. It'd be a reasonable name for a continuation monad action that actually did something akin to what it does in the contexts whence the name was borrowed, but even that would be inaccurate since not even in the context of a continuation monad is there a notion of "the current procedure". In any case, `return` evokes the imperative intuition in learners that should be trying desperately to avoid the imperative intuition in order to understand Haskell's use of the word "function", especially since the Haskell community does also use the word "return" to talk about the value produced by a function when applied to an argument. I see no pedagogical value in `return`, and I've had better results teaching Haskell when I avoid mentioning it at all. Not a single Haskell monad can be described clearly and accurately using the traditional vocabulary of imperative programming; not even IO.