A sample revised prelude for numeric classes

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Tue, 13 Feb 2001 14:01:25 -0500, Dylan Thurston <dpt@math.harvard.edu> pisze:

> Consequences: you cannot, e.g., raise a Double to an Integer power
> without an explicit conversion or calling a different function (or
> declaring your own instance).  Is this acceptable?

I don't like it: (-3::Double)^2 should be 9, and generally x^(2::Integer)
should be x*x for all types of x where it makes sense. Same for Int.

(**) does not work for negative base. Neither of (^) and (**) is
a generalization of the other: the knowledge that an exponent is
restricted to integers widens the domain of the base.

x^2 = x*x cannot actually work for any x in Num, or whatever the class
of (*) is called, if (^) is not defined inside the same class. This
is because (^) is unified with (^^): the unified (^) should use recip
if available, but be partially defined without it if it's not available.

So I propose to put (^) together with (*). With a default definition
of course. It means "apply (*) the specified number of times", and
for fractional types has a meaning extended to negative exponents.
(^) is related to (*) as discussed times or scale is related to (+).

(**):: a -> a -> a, together with other analytic functions. Sorry,
the fact that they are written the same in conventional math is not
enough to force their unification against technical reasons. It's
not bad: we succeeded in unification of (^) and (^^).

-- 
 __("<  Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak@knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/
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QRCZAK