[Haskell-cafe] Splitting off many/some from Alternative

[Carl Howells]

> Don't be silly. The purpose of some and many is to be used with combinators
> that are expected to fail sometimes. If you use them with combinators that
> always succeed, of course you're going to get an infinite loop. Would you
> propose to ban recursive functions because they might not terminate?
>
> Apparently the confusion here lies with the fact that the documentation for
> some and many are too terse for their behaviour to be easily understood.
> That's a whole different category of problem than "ban them!".

Well, as I read it, the whole point of this thread was "They don't
make sense for many instances of Alternative.  They should be moved to
a different class."  It sounded like you were arguing that any
instance of Alternative where they don't make sense shouldn't be an
instance of Alternative, instead.

Carl