[Haskell-cafe] Justification for Ord inheriting from Eq?

[Brian Hulley]

John Meacham wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 09:31:24PM +0100, Brian Hulley wrote:
>> I've been wondering for a long time if there is a reason why Ord
>> should inherit from Eq and not vice versa, or whether in fact there
>> is any justification for making either Ord or Eq inherit from the
>> other one.
>
> The problem is that having an order implies you have equality, so
> deriving Eq from Ord won't actually mean anything.

Thanks, I didn't think of it that way.

>
> in haskell classes _do_ define interfaces, not concrete
> representations so the problems with inherentence of non-abstract
> classes in OO languages don't apply.

What I was trying to argue was that inheritance of classes in Haskell is not 
needed because the only "good" use (IMO) of inheritance in other languages 
is already dealt with in Haskell by the class/instance distinction: the 
classes defining the interfaces and the instances defining the concrete 
implementations.

The problem of allowing classes (in Haskell) to inherit is that you end up 
with heirarchies which fix the design according to some criteria which may 
later turn out to be invalid, whereas if there were no hierarchies then you 
could just use the particular classes that are needed for the particular 
function, eg explicitly supplying Eq and Ord instead of just Ord etc (though 
for a sort function Ord by itself would be sufficient).

For example the re-organisation of numeric classes might not have been 
necessary if there were no inheritance relationships between them (though I 
don't know enough details to take this example further).

Regards, Brian.