RE: A propos de monad/About monads

From: Frank A. Christoph (christo@nextsolution.co.jp)
Date: Mon Oct 04 1999 - 16:46:44 MET DST


From: "Frank A. Christoph" <christo@nextsolution.co.jp>
To: "CAML Mailing list" <caml-list@inria.fr>
Subject: RE: A propos de monad/About monads
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 23:46:44 +0900
In-Reply-To: <000201bf0e44$11bfa300$0150ebca@nextsolution.co.jp>

I wrote:
> Philippe Esperet wrote:
> > ``monad'' est le mot anglais correspondant ?<< monade >>, entit?
> > complexe intervenant dans le syst?e philosophique de Leibniz (Monade
> > en allemand).
>
> I don't understand French, but I parsed this as saying that monads in the
> sense used here have something to do with Leibniz's philosophical
> theory of monads, which is false.

Toby Moth has informed me (and given a semi-mystical exposition involving
the Holy Trinity :) of another notion of "monad" hailing from non-standard
real analysis, due to the logician Robinson, and in this case it appears
that the term was in fact derived from Leibniz's ideas. These monads of
course have nothing to do with the ones from category theory, which are the
ones relevant for denotational semantics and functional programming.

--FAC



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