On 09-Feb-2001, Brian Boutel
Patrik Jansson wrote:
The fact that equality can be trivially defined as bottom does not imply that it should be a superclass of Num, it only explains that there is an ugly way of working around the problem.
...
There is nothing trivial or ugly about a definition that reflects reality and bottoms only where equality is undefined.
I disagree. Haskell is a statically typed language, and having errors
which could easily be detected at compile instead being deferred to
run time is ugly in a statically typed language.
--
Fergus Henderson