On Jan 11, 2008 1:27 AM, Wolfgang Jeltsch <
g9ks157k@acme.softbase.org> wrote:
Am Freitag, 11. Januar 2008 08:11 schrieb Lennart Augustsson:
> Some people seem to think that == is an equality predicate.
> This is a big source of confusion for them; until they realize that == is
> just another function returning Bool they will make claims like
> [1..]==[1..] having an unnatural result.
>
> The == function is only vaguely related to the equality predicate in that
> it is meant to be a computable approximation of semantic equality (but
> since it's overloaded it can be anything, of course).
>
> -- Lennart
But class methods are expected to fulfill some axioms. I'd suppose that (==)
should be an equivalence relation. Of course, this is not implementable
because of infininte data structures. But one could relax the axioms such
that it's allowed for (==) to return _|_ instead of the expected value.
Differentiating between data and codata would of course be the better
solution.
However, the fact that (0 / 0) == (0 / 0) yields False is quite shocking. It
doesn't adhere to any meaningful axiom set for Eq. So I think that this
behavior should be changed. Think of a set implementation which uses (==) to
compare set elements for equality. The NaN behavior would break this
implementation since it would allow for sets which contain NaN multiple
times.
Best wishes,
Wolfgang