[Haskell-cafe] Re: Positive integers

[Aaron Denney]

On 2006-03-26, Daniel McAllansmith <dagda at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> I was thinking about several things in this thread, torsors, overflow 
> semantics, bounds checking...
> I wonder if there would be any merit in being able to define constrained 
> subsets of integers and the semantics when/if they overflow.
>
> For example, take UNIX nice levels -20 to 19.  You could have
>   data ConstrainedInteger = CI {distToMax :: Natural, distToMin :: Natural}
> this would ensure only the 40 integers can be represented.
> Then you could have _something_ that defined what happened on overflow, 
> whether it wraps, reflects, errors, truncates or whatever.
>
> When it comes to compile, or source preprocessing, time these numbers
> could be realigned to a primitive Int or Word representation of
> suitable size and have the appropriate overflow code written in.  And,
> in the case of error or wrap overflow semantics on a set of the right
> size, the overflow checks could be disabled, like other assertions, at
> runtime.

Now that is an interesting idea.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-