[Haskell-cafe] instance Enum Double considered not entirely great?

[Casey McCann]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 6:58 PM, Daniel Fischer
<daniel.is.fischer at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 21 September 2011, 00:20:09, Casey McCann wrote:
>> Because
>> NaN values never compare equal to themselves, I'm not sure if it's
>> even possible to remove them from the structure,
>
> filter (not . isNaN)
>
> resp.
>
> filterWithKey (\k _ -> not $ isNaN k)

Er, right. Yes, of course. I'm not sure what I was thinking there. :]
Though that still leaves the question of any damage done in the
meantime, unless the filtering would repair the tree in the process.

>> and because of tree
>> rebalancing I'm not sure how to predict what the impact of one or more
>> NaNs would be over multiple operations on the data structure.
>
> Yuck. Don't even try to predict that (unless you absolutely have to).

Agreed. The consequence of not trying, however, is that it isn't
viable to let things slide at all--every insertion must be checked for
NaNs, because otherwise you lose any guarantee that the tree will be
valid next time you use it.

One can imagine a similar data structure designed to be resilient and
predictable in the face of ill-behaved comparisons, but surely it
would be easier to just fix the problem instances!

>> If you'd like to see an explicit demonstration (which you can try in
>> GHCi yourself!) see here:
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6399648/what-happens-to-you-if-you-br
>> eak-the-monad-laws/6399798#6399798 where I use it as an example of why
>> it's important for type class instances to obey the relevant laws.
>
> Nice and short.

Yes, and credit where due for the original example. :] Don't recall
which -cafe thread that came from, though.

- C.