On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 03:25:11PM +0100, Koen Claessen wrote:
What do people think about this? If people prefer these stylistic changes, I think we should not hesitate making them for Haskell/2 by completely redesigning the module structure and using more consistent naming conventions.
These sound great to me. If Haskell/2 is indeed open to such changes, would also be possible to revamp the numeric modules? As a mathematician, I get annoyed by such things as * (+) and (-) being lumped in with (*) (doesn't anyone use vector spaces?) * the function 'atan2' being mixed in with a bunch of operations very specific to the floating point format in the 'RealFloat' class. Same problem (though less serious) with 'quot', etc., and 'toInteger' in the Integral class. * Superfluous superclasses: why are Show and Eq superclasses of Num? Not all numeric types have decidable equality. Think arbitrary precision reals. (I saw Mechvelliani's Basic Algebra Proposal; it strikes me as being too complicated for the task.) Best, Dylan Thurston