[Haskell-cafe] Re: map (-2) [1..5]

[Jón Fairbairn]

Aaron Denney <wnoise at ofb.net> writes:

> On 2006-09-08, Jón Fairbairn <jon.fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> > Why shouldn't Naturals be more primitive than Integers?
> 
> Certainly they're more primitive.  Too primitive to have reasonable
> algebraic properties.

Hmph. Naturals obey (a+b)+c == a+(b+c), which is a nice and
reasonable algebraic property that Float and Double don't
obey. In fact Float and Double have lots of /un/reasonable
algebraic properties, but we still have them in the
language.  (I think they should be turfed out into a
numerical library).

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk
http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/Stuff-I-dont-want.html  (updated 2006-09-07)