Re: Proposal: New Eq and Ord instances for Double and Float

Oh actually, (I think) I was wrong about us violating the laws (if you ignore the compare method's implied meaning). It does, however, violate any kinds of laws we might have for Ord, where compare should agree with the Bool comparison operators, and e.g. min/max should be commutative. Basically, I don't think we should be held back by shitty conventions that other languages (or standards bodies) introduced. It's not like you're really *supposed* to be comparing vanilla Floats/Doubles, so most people try to avoid it anyway. The scheme in this proposal would remove one of the reasons it's usually nonsensical to compare them directly, if anything. I'm in favor, but not strongly so. I just think it's an ugly wart on the language that doesn't really buy us much beyond compliance with a flawed standard. On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 1:10 AM, Daniel Peebles wrote:

Is it? our Ord class already violates the IEEE spec (and can't help it), so we might as well violate it and be mathematically useful.

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 1:05 AM, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:

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On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 10:53 PM, Daniel Fischer < daniel.is.fischer@googlemail.com> wrote:

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Proposal: Provide Double and Float with Eq and Ord instances that introduce a total order.

I am strongly against this proposal, as it is in an area that is particularly poorly understood by most programmers (even experts). While the current behaviour may be undesirable from some points of view, at least it is consistent with most other programming languages - and this is one of the few areas where I think that's important.

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