Re: Proposal: Make Eq type class single method

I will also offer my own counter-proposal to intrinsic-superclasses, at https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/instance-templates. These all predate our current proposals process. I believe they were all conceived to solve the Applicative/Monad problem (for those of you who weren't around then: Applicative was not always a superclass of Monad), and I'm not sure they will work perfectly here: we might need to make a new class, say, Equality and keep the current Eq as a subclass. Do look at the proposals, but your mileage may vary. Richard

On Oct 25, 2021, at 4:50 PM, Hécate wrote:

There are the DefaultSuperclassInstances and Intrinsic Superclasses which aim to provide in-compiler support for such transitions:

https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/intrinsic-superclasses https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/intrinsic-superclasses

But also code-modding would benefit from being used here, and maybe retrie (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/retrie https://hackage.haskell.org/package/retrie) would benefit from being used at scale?

Le 25/10/2021 à 19:05, Ryan Trinkle a écrit :

...

Is there a language feature that could be built that would reduce the cost of inter-package refactors like this in the future?

On October 25, 2021 4:06:46 PM UTC, "Hécate" mailto:hecate@glitchbra.in wrote: Hi Joachim :)

I will have to express a friendly but firm disagreement on the argument of a "one time cost". You will also have to open PRs for every library, change pedagogical material, broadcast those changes to developers, and provide scripts for code-modding tools in order to automate this on proprietary codebases.

Side-proposal

If you really want to break a bunch of things and fix mistake of the past, I would suggest to really go for the throat and have PartialEq, PartialOrd, Eq, and Ord

We could finally get rid of the Eq instance for the various IEEE types like Double, and promote property testing to the wider public to verify that the laws are indeed respected by the implementations.

module NewClasses where

import Prelude hiding (Eq(..), Ord(..))

-- | Equality comparisons which are partial equivalence relations. class PartialEq a where (==) :: a -> a -> Bool

-- | Equality comparisons which are equivalence relations. -- It is laws-only and manual implementations would be -- verified through property testing. class PartialEq a => Eq a

-- | Partial order class PartialEq a => PartialOrd a where compare' :: a -> a -> Maybe Ordering (<) :: a -> a -> Bool (<=) :: a -> a -> Bool (>) :: a -> a -> Bool (>=) :: a -> a -> Bool

-- | Total order class (PartialOrd a, Eq a) => Ord a where compare :: a -> a -> Ordering max :: a -> a -> a min :: a -> a -> a

Cheers, Hécate

Le 25/10/2021 à 15:22, Joachim Breitner a écrit : Hi,

ah, yes, let me summarize my main motivation (perf benefits were just a side-benefit I was hoping for):

You can’t implement (/=) faster than (==) (up to, in the worst case, the cost of a single `not`, which often gets optimized away anyways).

As such, having (/=) in Eq was a (small) mistake back then, and it’s worth fixing.

There is one time cost of asking developers to _remove_ code. But code that was probably not worth writing in the first place! And I don’t blame them, the Eq class _invites_ writing that code.

Then the benefits are twofold:

* No more awkwards explanations about silly things in the likely first type class that developers care about.

* Less code to read, maintain, compile in all the libraries that _do_ define (/=) right now.

* Devs who instantiate Eq in the future will not be tricked into wondering if they need to implement (/=) and why.

So even if “helps teaching beginners” doesn’t beat “having to bug maintainers”, then maybe the second point (“saving all develpers time and effort in the future”) does?

Cheers, Joachim

-- Hécate ✨ 🐦: @TechnoEmpress IRC: Hecate WWW: https://glitchbra.in https://glitchbra.in/ RUN: BSD Libraries mailing list Libraries@haskell.org mailto:Libraries@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libraries http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libraries -- Hécate ✨ 🐦: @TechnoEmpress IRC: Hecate WWW: https://glitchbra.in https://glitchbra.in/ RUN: BSD

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