Hello, Olaf! It makes sense absolutely and totally! Even more, I'm using BoolValue and Boolean (from AC-Boolean package) instances already. And IMHO it's right way to proceed with this. Such way allows to treat Unix shell exit codes as "success", "failure" even (but in the case with them it will be homomorphism, which is interesting case, because in logic we have "base" values {0, 1} for classical logic, [0...1] for fuzzy logic, this is some kind of logical base too - how is it called?) 05.07.2018 23:26, Olaf Klinke wrote:
Indeed, why use Bool when you can have your own algebraic datatype? Why not
data Equality = Equal | NotEqual (==) :: Eq a => a -> a -> Equality
when we have essentially the same for 'compare' already? Why not use
data Result = Success | Failure
as the return type of effectful code? Equality and Result are Booleans with some provenance. But wait! Equality does not come with all the nice functions like (||) and (&&), and Failure still does not tell us what exactly went wrong. Maybe a derivable type class IsomorphicToBool could remedy the former problem. For the latter, Haskell has exception monads. One of the things I love about Haskell is that I do not have to use Int as a return type and remember that negative numbers mean failure of some sort, or worse, the return type is Void but some global variable may now contain the error code of the last function call. In some post in haskell-cafe which I am unable to find right now it was mentioned that the GHC source contains many types that are isomorphic but not equal to Bool. Does anyone know whether the C and C++ folks are now using more informative structs as return types?
Cheers, Olaf