[Haskell-cafe] Why is Bool no instance of Num and Bits?

[Sittampalam, Ganesh]

Stephan Friedrichs wrote:

> When looking for an xor function, I found one in Data.Bits but
> couldn't use it for Bool, because Bool is no instance of Bits and of
> Num (which would be necessary, because it's "class (Num b) => Bits
> b"). My question is: Why not?  
> 
> [...]
> quite trivial... Why is this not part of base? Or am I missing
> something? 

One reason would be that we don't want 1 + True to typecheck, even if it
does have a sensible interpretation.

Ganesh

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