Thanks for the link, it seems a lot more complicated than I thought, but understandable since the Peano arithmetic is fully recursive, it may has the same performance issue even at value level. 

This make type level Nat less attractive, I think. With TypeLits (assuming it doesn't have the slow performance issue) it is impossible to write something like:

add :: a -> b -> a+b
add a b = a+b

?

Thanks 
Baojun
On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 13:48 Will Yager <will.yager@gmail.com> wrote:
As I recall from the Idris paper, the compiler has special knowledge about types like Nat. As you have noticed, actually computing peano numbers is quite slow. Take a look at https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-typelits-natnormalise for an example of "cheating" and embedding integers at the type level with special support. 

Will 

On Apr 17, 2017, at 3:34 PM, Baojun Wang <wangbj@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello cafe,

I tried to play with some type level natural numbers, and it seems type level function is quite slow, for instance:

(full source)

data Z
data S n

class KnownNat n where
  natSing :: n -> Integer

instance KnownNat Z where
  natSing _ = 0
instance KnownNat n => KnownNat (S n) where
  natSing _ = 1 + natSing (undefined :: n)

natVal :: KnownNat n => n -> Integer
natVal = natSing

natSing doesn't seems to know how to optimize when KnownNat is very big (i.e: 10000), I tried Peano Add/Mul, and they are very slow to be really useful. Is there any ways to improve this? How fully dependent typed language such as Adga/Idris handle this, do they have the same performance issue?

Thanks
baojun
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to:
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.