On 11/18/10 18:39, Daniel Peebles wrote:
I like this idea. As I mentioned on IRC, I'd call the class Hash rather than Hashable. I'm also with you on the Word return type. It may be less convenient but maybe this will be a tiny step towards the "great Word revolt" (in which all conceptually unsigned things in the prelude and standard libraries actually become unsigned) that I hope will occur sometime in the near future.
"great Word revolt"? Don't do it. Not that way. It's a risky proposition in C, and the Haskell types work the same way, except they're called "Word" instead of "unsigned". For example, on my machine,
(1 - 2) :: Word 18446744073709551615
However, I'm mildly in favor of hash results being Words, because they're not supposed to be used as meaningful numbers anyway. Int is good for numbers that are moderately meaningful. These hashes are more like bit-sequences, where -- if arithmetic is used at all -- Word's modular nature is what we *want*, and its equal treatment of the top bit is what we want (vs. being related to the number's sign). -Isaac