Haskell 98 - Standard Prelude - Floating Class

[Brian Boutel]

Kent Karlsson wrote:
> 
> Default definitions may be inefficient, but in my opinion, default definitions
> for approximate operations should not give drastically lower accuracy, and
> should certainly not violate any other reasonable expectations (like that sin x
> returns x for x close to 0).
> 

I agree. 

The idea of giving defaults was that class mathods are not always
independent, so no harm is done by defining some in terms of others, but
there is no obligation to supply them. This thinking did not take into
account problems of numerical accuracy with types with fixed-size
floating-point representations.

If a default definition can have seriously bad numerical behaviour then
it should never be used, and I see no point in supplying it. To do so
would just encourage users to accept the definition and get bad results.

--brian