Numeric class lattice reworking?

One of the complaints I've seen with people trying to do various mathematical tasks in haskell is the inflexibility of the numeric prelude. The biggest issue is having (*) and (+) in the same typeclass, but other generalizations are certainly possible. MPTC would allow such things as modules with (*) having type a -> b -> b which covers everything from group actions to scalar multiplication of vectors. Actually, a -> b -> c would be nice. See http://haskell.org/hawiki/DimensionalizedNumbers this would let me have multiplication of numbers with units, enforced at the type level, while keeping the safety of (+) :: a -> a -> a. Is there any chance of this sort of breakup happening? -- Aaron Denney -><-

Sorry your mail didn't get through right away. Don't worry, the list isn't moderated; I had to tweak a setting for new subscribers. No more messages should get held up. Thanks for your post. John Launchbury is interested in reworking the Num hierarchy, so you might ping him. There's a vague mention of it here: http://haskell.galois.com/cgi-bin/haskell-prime/trac.cgi/wiki/Prelude and here: http://haskell.galois.com/cgi-bin/haskell-prime/trac.cgi/ticket/58 The above is a proposal for a proposal. We don't even have an informal proposal as of yet. Does anyone want to make an informal proposal? peace, isaac
participants (2)
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Aaron Denney
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isaac jones