[Haskell-cafe] Re: Laws and partial values

[Benja Fallenstein]

Hi Lennart,

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:47 PM, Lennart Augustsson
<lennart at augustsson.net> wrote:
> You can dream up any semantics you like about bottom, like it has to
> be () for the unit type.
> But it's simply not true.  I suggest you do some cursory study of
> denotational semantics and domain theory.

Umh. It's certainly not Haskell, but as far as I can tell, the
semantics Bob likes are perfectly fine domain theory. (_|_, _|_) = _|_
is the *simpler* definition of domain-theoretical product (and
inl(_|_) = inr(_|_) = _|_ is the simpler definition of
domain-theoretical sum), and the unit of this product (and sum) is
indeed the type containing only bottom. Lifting everything, as Haskell
does, is extra. I suppose it's unusual that Bob wants to lift sums but
not products, but there's nothing theoretically fishy about it that I
can see.

All the best,
- Benja

P.S. For anybody wanting to brush up:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axj/pub/papers/handy1.pdf
-- Section 3.2. -B