I have been working on an OCaml library for representing computationally useful algebraic structures as composable modules.¹ The library involves lots of module-level programming and is modeled after Haskell’s representation of such structures in its typeclasses. The techniques I’m using for representing these structures in OCaml modules have been demonstrated and developed by numerous people already, and I am borrowing from (and referencing) their work. My only contribution is in taking the time to go through the tree of Haskell typeclasses and leverage those techniques to port the structures into a documented, tested, and packaged OCaml library.

Up to this point, I have implemented a non-trivial core of common structures and I have been making use of these in my OCaml port of These. I am currently doing the finishing work required to prepare the library for publication.

The provisional name for this library has been Alg, short for “algebra”, short for “algebraic structure”. However, a fruitful discussion with a seasoned OCaml contributor convinced me that I should be mindful of the price of real estate in the opam package repository namespace. Alg is a pretty pricey string: it is brief, early in the alphabet, and evocative enough it might be used for a dozen other things. In contrast, the library I have been developing is quite experimental² and my initial implementation is likely to be utterly imperfect³. It doesn’t seem fitting that I should colonize such a precious plot of signs. So I’ve been hunting for a more suitable name.

Why does the name matter? Why not just pick some clunky, explicit phrase like experimental_algebraic_structures, or a cute, vaguely meaningful portmanteau like meowlgebra?

The cliched rhetorical question “What’s in a name?” is usually taken to denigrate names, but it is drawn from this famous passage in Romeo and Juliet:

Juliet:

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet

Romeo:

[Aside] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?

Juliet:

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, And for that name which is no part of thee Take all myself.

Romeo:

I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized; Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

This passage does not demonstrate the insignificance of names. On the contrary, it presents a scenario in which names are of decisive importance.

Romeo’s name marks him as an enemy because ’Mantague’ brands him as a foe of the Capulets. The famous line, “That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet;” clearly claims that the sense properties of objects are not affected by their names (tho I suspect in a world where roses were called “shit-blossoms”, they might smell a bit like doo doo). However, the whole exchange revolves around the fact that appellations reflect and help actualize important structures in reality.

Names work to reinforce social orders and designate belonging, which is why Juliet conjoins “Deny thy father” with “refuse they name” as if these acts where inseparable. While names are not essential properties of people (or most other things) (“that name which is no part of thee”), they nonetheless bind beings into relationships that form structures with a very real being of their own. Romeo and Juliet’s rebellion against their families’ feud presents a claim for the independent value of freely chosen, dyadic, romantic relations. It even asserts the superior value of this personal dyadic structure over the structures of familial and political affiliation into which we are thrown in being born. According to Juliet, the person can be extricated from the bondage to their inherited enmity, emancipated from the fascistic structure of their family (or nation), because the tribe is not a part of the person:

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man.

Yet the name is a part of those fascistic structures, which is why it seems one pays for such emancipation by forsaking one’s given name – “O, be some other name!” – and being reborn through renaming “Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized;/ Henceforth I never will be Romeo.”

Thought moves through language⁴ and finds its ways through systems of signs⁵. These systems suggest certain possibilities and foreclose others. Since the significance of names comes from their situation within networks of differentiation, naming enacts a positioning of the named thing in a space of proximate thoughts.

What is in a name? A passage from the named thing to a situation in a network of associated thoughts and recollections which bind beings into objective, intersubjective, and purely subjective structures of possibility.

To name a newborn (person, thing, or thought) is almost always to give it the name of something else. Initially, no thing or person can name itself. As a rule, a precondition of a name coming to belong to something (“my name”, “your name”, “its name”) is that someone first “names it after” some other thing(s). According to Aristotle in the Poetics, this is the very definition of metaphor : “Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else” (1457b). Aristotle states quite explicitly that making metaphor sets the named thing in relation to that after which it is named, and, moreover, that it is an art that cannot be taught:

the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars

(Aristotle 1984, 1459 a))

I’ll postulate here that to recognize “similarity in dissimilars”, can only be achieved through identification of structural correspondence⁶. To bestow upon A a name that belongs to B is to establish a way for thought. This way has the potential to “carry thought across” from consideration of the singular being of A to the being of B (or broadly to all those things which bear the name). This brings thoughts of A into the same constellations that we’ve formed for the circulation of our thoughts of B. Naming is thus a speech act which transforms the topology of being, insofar as the connectedness of beings is mutually determined with the connectedness of thoughts.

When we misname a thing, we misplace it into the complex of structures that contribute to the determination of being. This can effect a deformation of the orders of being and impose real ruptures in the proper connectedness of things (at least insofar as intersubjectivity contributes to the constitution of reality). Making bad metaphor miscarries thought, since it actualizes relations between thoughts that are “unnatural”, in the sense that they disrupt the corelation of “transformations between spaces and transformations within thought”.

I don’t know if this yields any insight for the reader (or for myself), but it at least presents one account of why naming well is hard and why it matters.

This ramble records traces of the many sources I’ve dipped into as I’ve worked to discover a suitable name for the nascent library. My reading took me through Haskell docs, Wikipedia articles, articles by and about William Lawvere, articles by and about Hermann Grassmann, old writings from my unfinished thesis, (where I found the Aristotle excerpted above), numerous dictionaries, and I even followed a cliche to Shakespeare’s most overrated play. I have managed to convince myself that naming matters: I believe that the metaphorizing nature of name-bestowal, and the situatedness it determines, places the practice of naming as one poetic analog of the formal techniques pursued and developed in category theory. The common concern is to discover (and improve) the “naturalness” that allows transformations of being (spaces) and transformations of thought to align in accordance with a harmony (which we may hope for as eventual rather than posit as pre-established).

But, did this wandering way help me come up with a suitable name? Yes! Just a moment ago – as I was laughing at myself for how much time I spent digging around in marginalia and stringing together arguably frivolous connections, only to turn up empty handed – my thoughts wound around in a way that resemble this sequence:

Well, what have I learned through my reading and writing today?

A name should help situate the named thing in it’s proper relations. In the act of naming we help establish order in the structures of thought, in the hopes that they reflect and can effect the structures of being in ways that we deem to be good and natural. So, think on what this library properly is, how it works, and what it does. What names can we give to it (names which must first belong to other things) that will help guide it into connection with the things among which it belongs?

I let my attention float over some source code and then – eureka – inspiration struck! I present to you alg_structs

At first glance, this name appears stupidly obvious: It’s just an abbreviation for “algebraic structures”! I noted that Alg was an abbreviation for this phrase way back – hours of writing and studying ago – in paragraph one.

On further consideration, you’ll probably realize that it is not only stupidly obvious and overly literal, it is also longish and ugly sounding. It doesn’t even look pretty.

However, you may not have noticed that it is also a pun! :P

In OCaml, a module is specified by a sig and implemented as a struct:

module Some_module : sig
  (* ...type declarations and value specifications... *)
end = struct
  (* ...type declarations and value bindings... *)
end

This is all in accord with the ML module system that was developed in the early 80s. The spirit of the ML module system traces back to an effort to “give structured descriptions of theories”, and the theories that are to be described are “algebraic theories” as developed by Lawvere.

In “Modules for Standard ML”, which proposes all of the most important aspects of ML modules, David McQueen wrote:

This proposal is based on the fruits of a long collaboration with Rod Burstall on prototype designs for modules in Hope [MAC81], and on theoretical investigations with Ravi Sethi and Gordon Plotkin [MAC82, MAC84] that were motivated by those designs. The module designs for Hope were in turn influenced by the Clear specification language of Burstall and Goguen [BUR77].

(MacQueen 1984)

“[BUR77]” refers to Burstall and Goguen’s paper “Putting theories together to make specifications.” The first line reads:

We have been developing a language in which you can give structured descriptions of theories.

(Burstall and Goguen 1977)

Under the section “What we mean by a theory”, they explain

The notion of theory is a loose intuitive one in mathematics. There should be axioms, rules of inference and theorems, but the language in which they are expressed is open to choice. … We have chosen an algebraic notion of theory, due to Lawvere (1963) [references his 1963 thesis Functorial Semantics Of Algebraic Theories (Lawvere 1963)] …

[cite:Burstall:1977:PTT:1622943.1623045 p. 1047]

Later they give their definition of a theory and an algebra:

A theory is a signature together with a set of equations closed under inference by reflexivity, transitivity and symmetry of equality and by substitution.

…

The interpretations of a theory are algebras, where an algebra is a collection of sets, one for each sort, with a function over these sets assigned to each operator of the theory.

[cite:Burstall:1977:PTT:1622943.1623045 p. 1048]

OCaml modules are faithful to this design.

The sig specifies the signature, which Burstall and Goguen define as “a set of sort names and a set of operator symbols, each with a given sequence of sorts for its arguments and sequence of sorts for its results (1047)”. This is precisely what ML signatures specify, tho we now say type where they said sort.

The struct provides the set of equations. The reflexivity, transitivity and symmetry of equations is taken care of by the typed lambda calculus.

I intend to explore the concepts and implications of these connections at length, and have begun gathering notes in The Measure of a Module. For now, I’ll leave it at this: alg_structs aims to provide a library of computationally interesting algebraic structures. It represents these structures as modules implemented via structs and specified via sigs. The roots of the ML module system trace back to an effort to specify programs via algebraic theories. This traces out a little lopsided (perhaps spiralling?) circle, and I think that’s a good sign: the punning in the name reflects the nesting of similar structures, and I’m comfortable with taking that as proxy for naturalness.

Finally, the name is fitting since the preponderance of structs needed to specify relatively simple algebraic structures is gonna have users exclaiming “ALl these God damn STRUCTS?!” Here’s an example of an implementation of semigroup for Option types:

module Option = struct
  module Make (S : S) : S with type t = S.t Option.t = struct
    module Seed = struct
      type t = S.t Option.t
      let op a b =
        match a  , b with
        | None   , b      -> b
        | a      , None   -> a
        | Some a , Some b -> Some (S.op a b)
    end

    include Make (Seed)
  end
end