John Meacham wrote:
On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 09:31:24PM +0100, Brian Hulley wrote:
I've been wondering for a long time if there is a reason why Ord should inherit from Eq and not vice versa, or whether in fact there is any justification for making either Ord or Eq inherit from the other one.
The problem is that having an order implies you have equality, so deriving Eq from Ord won't actually mean anything.
Thanks, I didn't think of it that way.
in haskell classes _do_ define interfaces, not concrete representations so the problems with inherentence of non-abstract classes in OO languages don't apply.
What I was trying to argue was that inheritance of classes in Haskell is not needed because the only "good" use (IMO) of inheritance in other languages is already dealt with in Haskell by the class/instance distinction: the classes defining the interfaces and the instances defining the concrete implementations. The problem of allowing classes (in Haskell) to inherit is that you end up with heirarchies which fix the design according to some criteria which may later turn out to be invalid, whereas if there were no hierarchies then you could just use the particular classes that are needed for the particular function, eg explicitly supplying Eq and Ord instead of just Ord etc (though for a sort function Ord by itself would be sufficient). For example the re-organisation of numeric classes might not have been necessary if there were no inheritance relationships between them (though I don't know enough details to take this example further). Regards, Brian.