On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 3:48 PM, Chris Smith
But it would be the *wrong* thing to use as a desugaring for list range notation. List ranges are very unlikely to be useful or even meaningful for most such enumerations (what is [ Red, Green .. LightPurple]?); and conversely, as we've seen in this thread, list ranges *are* useful in situations where they are not a suitable way of enumerating all values of a type.
This makes me wonder if maybe the reason this discussion is happening at all is that we don't have a well-defined meaning for what Enum *is*. At this point, it seems like the only answer is that it's whatever the instance says it is, which I find unsatisfying. What exactly does Enum enumerate? To me, the list syntax sugar looks like I'm specifying bounds, so it makes sense to include all values within those bounds (and honestly, having instances for Float, Double, and Rational sounds like a mistake, given this), but clearly that is not what it means to everybody. What does it mean to you? What makes the current behavior more useful than the proposed behavior? You say we've seen that this behavior is useful in this thread, but I'm not sure what it is we have seen. - Jake