Re: [Haskell-cafe] multi type addition

On Tue, 28 Dec 2010, aditya siram wrote:

The problem here is that unfortunately the Haskell type system cannot do coercion.

I'd omit the "unfortunately". For me it is a good thing that Haskell does not silently apply lossy number conversions, as e.g. MatLab does. 'realToFrac' allows conversion to Float. It requires 'Real' constraint. Your 'Num' constraint is too weak, since 'Complex' is also in 'Num' type class. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Converting_numbers http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Generic_number_type