[Haskell-cafe] Why does the class called "Real" support only rationals, and not all reals?

bretm bret_x at hotmail.com
Mon Jun 4 11:21:49 EDT 2007




DavidA-2 wrote:
> 
> Yes, I'm afraid that you are understanding correctly. Annoying isn't it.
> 
> It is well-known (among Haskell mathematicians at least) that the numeric
> type 
> classes in the prelude are broken.
> 
> Here's one proposal for a small step in the right direction:
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/ticket/112
> 
> But it really needs a mathematician to sit down and sort it out properly.
> 

Yes, very annoying. If I ran into this so quickly it makes me wonder how it
ended up this way. It also makes me wonder what else is broken, but at least
it doesn't appear to be a problem with the language itself. So far Haskell
has been a real eye-opener, as I've been programming for 26 years and
haven't been exposed to functional programming before now. It's embarrassing
to say, actually.


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