[Haskell-cafe] Linguistic hair-splitting

[Tristan Seligmann]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Conal Elliott <conal at conal.net> wrote:
> I don't like this bias toward singling out Monad among all of the type
> classes, thereby perpetuating the misleading mystique surrounding Monad.  If
> you're going to call [3,5,8] "a monadic value", then please give equal time
> to other type classes by also calling [3,5,8] "a functorial value"
> ("functorific"?), "an applicative value", "a monoidal value", "a foldable
> value" ("foldalicious"?), "a traversable value", "a numeric value" (see the
> applicative-numbers package), etc.  Similarly when referring to values of
> other types that happen to be monads as well as other type classes.

The thing is, you're not always referring to a concrete value. If
you're discussing a value of type [Integer], then sure, you can call
it a list of Integer; but what if you're discussing a value of type
(Monad m) => m Integer, or even (Monad m) => m a?
-- 
mithrandi, i Ainil en-Balandor, a faer Ambar