* Barak A. Pearlmutter
In fiddling around with some numeric code in Haskell, I noticed some issues. Basically, you get warnings if you write
energy mass = mass * c^2
but not if you write
energy mass = mass * c * c
which seems a bit perverse. Some more examples are below.
I understand the inference issues that cause this, but common innocuous cases could---and I would argue, should---be addressed in ad-hoc ways.
Hi Barak, In a sense, defaulting in Haskell *is* a mechanism to address common innocuous cases in an ad-hoc way (although it still has a relatively simple and easy to understand semantics). If you'd like something even more ad-hoc, take a look at Ruby or JavaScript: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXEgk1Hdze0 Roman