The Universe of Disco

Addenda to recent articles 202210

I haven't done one of these in a while. And there have been addenda. I thought hey, what if I ask Git to give me a list of commits from October that contain the word ‘Addendum’. And what do you know, that worked pretty well. So maybe addenda summaries will become a regular thing again, if I don't forget by next month.

Most of the addenda resulted in separate followup articles, which I assume you will already have seen. ([1] [2] [3]) I will not mention this sort of addendum in future summaries.

• In my discussion of lazy search in Haskell I had a few versions that used do-notation in the list monad, but eventually abandoned it n favor of explicit concatMap. For example:

        s nodes = nodes ++ (s $ concatMap childrenOf nodes)
  

  I went back to see what this would look like with do notation:

        s nodes = (nodes ++) . s $ do
            n <- nodes
            childrenOf n
  

  Meh.

• Regarding the origin of the family name ‘Hooker’, I rejected Wiktionary's suggestion that it was an occupational name for a maker of hooks, and speculated that it might be a fisherman. I am still trying to figure this out. I asked about it on English Language Stack Exchange but I have not seen anything really persuasive yet. One of the answers suggests that it is a maker of hooks, spelled hocere in earlier times.

  (I had been picturing wrought-iron hooks for hanging things, and wondered why the occupational term for a maker of these wasn't “Smith”. But the hooks are supposedly clothes-fastening hooks, made of bone or some similar finely-workable material. )

  The OED has no record of hocere, so I've asked for access to the Dictionary of Old English Corpus of the Bodleian library. This is supposedly available to anyone for noncommercial use, but it has been eight days and they have not yet answered my request.

  I will post an update, if I have anything to update.

[Other articles in category /addenda] permanent link