Yes, this is more correct, and I was also imagining the category being something like "space-delimited strings." I realize that'd require redefining things lik

Yes, this is more correct, and I was also imagining the category being something like "space-delimited strings." I realize that'd require redefining things like string concatenation to be "space-delimited concatenation" and other such bits. Anyhow, I was playing loose and I know it. If I were writing in a more serious context I'd cross all the t's and dot all the i's. To me the more important thing was this slow gnawing in my gut, seeing hints of natural transformations and adjoint functors here and there and thinking, "Oh come on, there has to be a way to connect these dots." Non-functional languages like Ruby don't think in this way, so there are hole all over the language.