Re: Proposal: Add hasBitSize to Data.Bits.Bits

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Henning Thielemann wrote:

On Mon, 13 Aug 2012, Johan Tibell wrote:

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On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Henning Thielemann wrote:

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If the method of 'FixedBitSize' is named 'bitSize' then only the type signature will be affected (FixedBitSize constraint instead of Bits). Although I don't know whether this is a good solution.

Imports will have to be modified as well if Bits keeps the name 'bitSize' for its method.

In general these kind of breakages has been very painful in the past. Most libraries need to support the last two or three released versions of GHC (and thus base) so breaking changes like this are likely to result in lots of #ifdefs in client code to paper over the differences.

That's true. How about keeping 'bitSize' as it is, maybe deprecate it in the future, add maybeBitSize to Bits class and add a new class FixedBitSize with method fixedBitSize?

This sounds more reasonably to me. I don't particularly need a fixedBitSize method, but if people have uses for it go ahead.