On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 5:27 AM, Jens Blanck
I was wondering if someone could give me some references to when and why the choice was made to default integral numerical literals to Integer rather than to Int in Haskell. Also, if you are aware of similar discussions in other languages. I'd like to use this information to make an analogous case for defaulting real numerical literals (well, the literals are likely to be in scientific notation, i.e., floating point) to some data type of computable reals rather than to floating point Double.
Integer (and Rational) have decidable equality testing. I don't think
the same can be said for computable reals. (Does pi == pi? How about 2
* asin 1?)
--
Dave Menendez