[Haskell-cafe] Integers v ints

[Henning Thielemann]

Jens Blanck schrieb:
> I was wondering if someone could give me some references to when and 
> why the choice was made to default integral numerical literals to 
> Integer rather than to Int in Haskell. Also, if you are aware of 
> similar discussions in other languages.
I think type defaulting is only an issue for GHCi because in compiled 
code you should not let the compiler and reader of your code guess the 
type. GHC -Wall warns about uses of default types.

> I'd like to use this information to make an analogous case for 
> defaulting real numerical literals (well, the literals are likely to 
> be in scientific notation, i.e., floating point) to some data type of 
> computable reals rather than to floating point Double.
You might be interested in
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Libraries_and_tools/Mathematics#Real_and_rational_numbers