Why is there no instance of Fractional Int or Fractional Integer? Obviously integers are fractions with denominator 1. I was just doing some basic stuff to get more familiar with Haskell, and was seriously racking my brain trying to figure out why the following wouldn't work: intToString :: Int -> [Char] intToString n | n<10 = chr (n + (ord '0')):[] intToString n = let q = truncate (n/10) r = n `mod` 10 o = ord '0' ch = chr (r + o) in ch:(intToString q) (yes, this ends up converting the string in reverse, but that's another issue :P) I later realized that I could use members of the Integral typeclass such as divMod, mod, etc to make this better, but nonetheless, why should truncate(n/10) be invalid, when n is an Int? changing it to truncate((toRational n)/10) works, but I would expect Integers to already be rational.