13 Jan
2006
13 Jan
'06
10:34 a.m.
Cale Gibbard wrote:
<Snip> So long as we're going to have a defaulting mechanism, it seems a bit odd to restrict it to Num, and to classes in the Prelude.
Instead of having literals such as 1 that could be Int, Integer, or Float etc, why not just have one Number type declared as something like: data Number = NInt Int | NInteger Integer | NFloat Float | NDouble Double | NRational Integer Integer | NComplex Number Number etc so that all numeric literals would just be translated by the compiler into a Number. Arithmetic ops would then not be overloaded but the compiler could hopefully optimize out the extra indirection caused by using Number instead of plain Int, Integer, etc. Regards, Brian.