On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 9:04 AM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mail@justinbogner.com">mail@justinbogner.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">John Goerzen <<a href="mailto:jgoerzen@complete.org">jgoerzen@complete.org</a>> writes:<br>
> Wikipedia's first sentence about monoids is:<br>
><br>
> In abstract algebra, a branch of mathematics, a monoid is an algebraic<br>
> structure with a single, associative binary operation and an identity<br>
> element.<br>
><br>
> Which is *not* intuitive to someone that comes from a background in....<br>
> any other programming language.<br>
><br>
<br>
</div>Instead of Wikipedia, why not try a dictionary? Looking up monoid using<br>
<a href="http://dictionary.com" target="_blank">dictionary.com</a>:<br>
<br>
An operator * and a value x form a monoid if * is<br>
associative and x is its left and right identity.<br>
<br>
On the other hand, appendable doesn't seem to be a word, and while you<br>
can infer that it means "something that can be appended to", that's only<br>
half of the story...<br>
<div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br>
<br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><font size="3">Monoid isn't something I came across and didn't understand, its something I should have been using for a long time before I discovered it. But it never jumped out at me when I was browsing the library documentation tree.<br>
</font>