Sam Martin
Is there a particular reason Float, Double, etc do not have instances of Data.Bits in the standard libraries? I note the Haskell 2010 report doesn't include them either.
In fact, I'm not actually sure how you'd implement the instance for floating point types without having some kind of compiler-specific extension, or a c-binding.
Could anyone fill in my missing knowledge here?
Some operations wouldn't make much sense with Float, for instance the 'complement' function. What should it return? Also note that bit manipulation functions could cover only a small window of the value range. So it could happen that x .|. y = x, even though y is nonzero. Also rotation would be a destructive operation. Nobody would really need the operations (we have integer types and UArray Int Bool for bit manipulation), and they would most likely be very slow. Greets, Ertugrul -- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://ertes.de/