[Haskell-cafe] Ensuring Type Class instances follow the 'rules'

[Eugene Kirpichov]

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2009/5/29 Hemanth Kapila <saihemanth at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
> Recently, I participated in a coding competition.
> As part of it, I had to write a program wherein I had to make my data-type
> an instance of Ord. An error in my implementation of compare resulted in me
> losing quite a bit of  valuable time.
> As  I wrote it, I had tested it out on the ghci and it seemed to work fine
> but I noticed that there was trouble when the List.sort started giving weird
> output. I then noticed that for certain instances (say t1,t2),  both compare
> t1 t2 AND compare t2 t1 returned LT. Once I spotted it, it was easy enough
> to fix but I did lose an hour or so thinking something went wrong before I
> fed the list to the sort function.
> I was the only haskeller in the competition and I believe am among the first
> to finish a correct application (by a large margin, and) and I did manage to
> raise a bit of haskell-awareness,  but if I had managed to spot the error
> earlier, the results would have been dazzling.
> Does any one here have any advice on dealing with such maladroitness on the
> part of the programmer, especially while creating instances to
> type-classes?
> Thanks and regards,
> Hemanth
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Eugene Kirpichov
Web IR developer, market.yandex.ru