
19 Mar
2013
19 Mar
'13
6:58 p.m.
From the paper Fun with Type Funs, it's said:
One compelling use of such type functions is to make type coercions implicit, especially in arithmetic. Suppose we want to be able to write add a b to add two numeric values a and b even if one is an Integer and the other is a Double (without writing fromIntegral explicitly).
And then an Add class is defined which can dispatch at the type-level to appropriate functions which resolve two types into one, with a catch-all case for Num. Has anyone put this into a package, for all common arithmetic operations? I would use it. Doing arithmetic stuff in Haskell always feels labored because of having constantly convert between number types.