[Haskell-cafe] Re: A question about "monad laws"

[ajb at spamcop.net]

G'day all.

Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

>> That's one of the warning signs I watch out for.  "Never compare floats for
>> equality" is a sure sign of someone who thinks they know about   
>> floats but don't.

Quoting Roman Leshchinskiy <rl at cse.unsw.edu.au>:

> Hmm. Personally, I've never seen an algorithm where comparing for exact
> equality was algorithmically necessary.

One trick I've occasionally used is to avoid the need for a discriminated
union of floating point and integer types by just using a floating point
number.

If you ignore bitwise operations and division/remainder, any integer
operation that doesn't cause overflow on 32-bit integers will work just
the same if you use IEEE-754 64-bit floating point numbers instead.
That includes equality.  Moreover, you even get a few more significant
bits of precision.

In these days of fast 64 and 128 bit words, it might not be entirely
moral, but it works.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage