semirings-0.7: two monoids as one, in holy haskimony
Haskellers are usually familiar with monoids and semigroups. A monoid has an appending operation <> (or mappend),
and an identity element, mempty. A semigroup has an appending <> operation, but does not require a mempty element.
A Semiring has two appending operations, plus and times, and two respective identity elements, zero and one.
More formally, a Semiring R is a set equipped with two binary relations + and *, such that:
(R,+) is a commutative monoid with identity element 0,
(R,*) is a monoid with identity element 1,
(*) left and right distributes over addition, and
multiplication by '0' annihilates R.