There are many reasons, but some of the more cited ones are that (<>) will break less code than (++) would, since (++) is ubiquitous and (<>) is most used in some pretty printers. Yes, mappend's type can be refined to that of the current list (++), but the increased polymorphism still has the potential to break existing code by making it harder to resolve instances.<div>
<br></div><div>As for (<>) meaning not equal to, do you also have a problem with Monad's (>>) meaning a right bitwise shift, or the mutationey form of it, (>>=)? :) I don't think anyone in Haskell has ever used (<>) to mean (/=), so the fact that there exist a couple of languages out there that do use it that way shouldn't affect our decision.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Dan<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 4:58 PM, aditya bhargava <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bluemangroupie@gmail.com">bluemangroupie@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>After asking this question:</div><div><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9963050/standard-way-of-joining-two-data-texts-without-mappend" target="_blank">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9963050/standard-way-of-joining-two-data-texts-without-mappend</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>I found out that the new infix operator for `mappend` is (<>). I'm wondering why ghc 7.4 didn't generalize (++) to work on monoids instead. To me, (++) is much more clear. (<>) means "not equal to" for me. Can anyone shed light on this decision?</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Adit</div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div><br></div>-- <br><a href="http://adit.io" target="_blank">adit.io</a><br>
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