[Haskell-cafe] Strange subtract operator behavior - and lazy naturals

[Yitzchak Gale]

Hi John,

I wrote:
>> - Zero really means 0, not "0 or negative"

You wrote:
> Actually, zero does mean zero. There is no such thing as negative
> numbers in the naturals so it doesn't make sense to say '0 or negative'.

Well, then, "0 or error", or "0 or nothing". It clearly
does not mean zero.

> Subtraction is necessarily defined differently of course.

As described in the referenced paper,
(yes, an enjoyable read, thanks) this is for
convenience only. No one is claiming that 1 - 2 == 0
in the naturals. It is just undefined. But we
find that returning Zero rather than raising
an exception happens to do the right thing for
certain common usages of the naturals.

Anyway, my point is that you have done two good
things here that are orthogonal to each other:
a good lazy integral type, and a good naturals type.

So why not make the laziness available
also for cases where "1 - 2 == 0" does _not_ do
the right thing?

data LazyInteger = IntZero | IntSum Bool Integer LazyInteger

or

data LazyInteger = LazyInteger Bool Nat

or whatever.

Thanks,
Yitz