On Fri, 4 Feb 2011 08:25:11 -0800 (PST), rickman wrote:
>Why did you use the term "monadic" rather than "unary"?
Thanks - that's a bit of jargon that I must have
incorrectly absorbed from somewhere. Now you've
provoked me into looking, I see that it's not even
strictly correct, at least not if you're a
mathematician or a (Haskell-style) functional
programmer. As you may guess, I am neither.
(Side note: some programming languages do tend to
use "monadic" and "dyadic" (and even "variadic")
to describe the number of arguments of a function.
APL is certainly one such. Maybe they're wrong too.)
> "Unary" is a much more common term
And rigorously accurate too. The style-checker
in my head (which usually serves me tolerably well)
has no problem with "unary operator", but finds
the sound of "unary function" rather strange.
Time for a re-calibrate, maybe.
Ho hum. Still getting things wrong after all
these years

--
Jonathan Bromley