Stefan O'Rear wrote:
Another possibility that occured to me recently, is to switch Integer to a simpler (perhaps even pure-Haskell) representation, and provide (core? extra? Hackage?) a hsgmp package. If you have big numbers, switching is easy:
import Prelude hiding(Integer) import Data.Integer.GMP type Integer = MPZ
except that lots of things depend on Prelude.Integer, such as class Num and Integral, potentially a fixed Enum, and who knows what functions that base exports. IMO there needs to be a standard Integer type for library APIs to use (unless making them all class-qualified like (Integral a) => is an acceptable substitute?). This does not fit well with different code using different Integers as they please, especially not if we want it to be likely/possible to be fast. Isaac