On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 11:39 PM, Gabriel Gonzalez <gabriel439@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm still not convinced by the Bounded instance for Maybe, which seems like a hack. I would prefer to just use the Monoid instance for "Maybe (Max a)" and just fmap "getMaximum" over the result rather than pretend that Maybe is Bounded when it's not.

Moreover, the entire Bounded constraint seems wrong in principle. There is no intuitive reason why some type should be bounded to be able to take a maximum of a set of elements. The Ord constraint should be sufficient to define a maximum.

Since I'm the one who initially mentioned the Bounded approach, let me say: I agree with this reasoning. It made sense in my specific case, but in general I don't think it's a good idea. Do we really want to make it impossible to use Max and Min with Integers?

Michael