7 Feb
2001
7 Feb
'01
4:17 p.m.
I have some questions about how Haskell's numeric classes might be revamped. Is it possible in Haskell to circumscribe the availability of certain "unsafe" numeric operations such as div, /, mod? If this is not possible already, could perhaps a compiler flag "-noUnsafeDivide" could be added to make such a restriction? What I have in mind is to remove division by zero as an untypable expression. The idea is to require div, /, mod to take NonZeroNumeric values in their second argument. NonZeroNumeric values could be created by functions of type: Number a => a -> Maybe NonZeroNumeric or something similar. Has this been tried and failed? I'm curious as to what problems there might be with such an approach. --PeterD