[Haskell-beginners] Would you shed light on "undefined values" please?
Costello, Roger L.
costello at mitre.org
Fri Jun 24 00:35:19 CEST 2011
Hi Folks,
In this book [1] the author defines the term "bottom":
In order that we can say that, without exception, every
syntactically well-formed expression denotes a value,
it is convenient to introduce a special symbol (upside
down T), pronounced 'bottom', to stand for the undefined
value of a particular type. In particular, the value of
infinity is the undefined value (bottom) of type Integer,
and 1/0 is the undefined value (bottom) of type Float.
Hence we can assert that 1/0 = bottom.
He defines infinity as this:
infinity :: Integer
infinity = infinity + 1
The author says this when discussing the Bool datatype:
It follows that there are not two but three Boolean
values, namely False, True, and bottom. In fact, every
datatype declaration introduces an extra anonymous
value, the undefined value of the datatype.
What is the undefined value (bottom) of type Bool?
What is the undefined value (bottom) of type String?
If I create my own datatype:
data MyBool = F | T
What is the undefined value (bottom) of type MyBool?
I am not clear why "bottom" is an important concept. Would you explain please?
/Roger
[1] Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell by Richard Bird
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