Christos,
Excellent question. Of the ones you mention, inject and embed have other meanings that don't work in your favor in this context. Absorb also has a different connotation in that the entity so absorbed doesn't necessarily remain intact, whereas there are a great deal of monads that have corresponding comonads allowing for extraction of the value previously "returned".
The intuitions of lift and wrap are good and less unfavorably overloaded. To the wrap side you might add
- contain
- confine
- enclose
- enfold
- box
- hold
To the lift side you might add
In my experience the container metaphor has the most "juice" for many communication contexts, so i would go with something from the "wrap" column, if it were my call.
Best wishes,
--greg
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Christos KK Loverdos
<loverdos@...> wrote:
Hi all,
We know that part of the definition of a monad is that nice little <return> function (in Haskell terminology) that embeds a value into the Monad. If you agree that <return> is not such a nice description, what else can we name it?
I am thinking of what the function does but I am not sure which of these phrases might be better:
1. lifts a value to a monad
2. wraps a value as a monad
3. injects a value into a monad
4. absorbs a value into a monad
5. embeds ... [which I used in the opening of this email and I almost forgot to enumerate
6. turns ... [which is in the subject of the email and I almost forgot to enumerate]
.. and I could go on...
As I see it there is no need for just one of them to be the winner but is there any one that may capture the semantics better?
Thoughts/Suggestions/Any Preference?
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