Maybe there is some deep mathematical reason why 'return' is named as such, but I suspect the person who gave it that name was trying (perhaps a bit too hard) t

Maybe there is some deep mathematical reason why 'return' is named as such, but I suspect the person who gave it that name was trying (perhaps a bit too hard) to make monadic code appear even more like the imperative code to which most of us are accustomed. More or less by coincidence, 'return' tends to appear in the same places you would see the 'return' statement in C and derived languages. But the purpose of the 'return' function in Haskell is quite different from the 'return' statement.