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

[Daniel Fischer]

On Sunday 25 September 2011, 23:13:47, Chris Smith wrote:
> > Don't mix range and arithmetic sequences. I want arithmetic sequences
> > for Double, Float and Rational, but not range.
> > (For Float and Double one could implement range [all values between
> > the given bounds, in increasing order, would be the desired/expected
> > semantics for that, I think?],
> 
> Okay, fine, I tried.  Obviously, I'm opposed to just flat removing
> features from the language, especially when they are so useful that they
> are being used without any difficulty at all by the 12 year olds I'm
> teaching right now.

Agreed. But If we want a change to remove a wart, we should try to remove 
it completely. We can still settle for "make it smaller" if it doesn't work 
out.

> 
> Someone (sorry, not me) should really write up the proposed change to
> Ord for Float/Double

Okay.

> and shepherd them through the haskell-prime process.

Uh oh. I ope that can be done with a libraries proposal.
(Ian says yes :-D)

> That one shouldn't even be controversial; there's already an
> isNaN people should be using for NaN checks, and any code relying on the
> current behavior is for all intents and purposes broken anyway.  The
> only question is whether to add the new methods to RealFloat (breaking
> on the bizarre off chance that someone has written a nonstandard
> RealFloat instance), or add a new IEEE type class.

Add to RealFloat, default to the Eq/Ord functions, I'd say.

But that's not the only question. Is -0.0 == 0.0 or not?
I lean towards no because of 1/x, but I'm not wedded to that.

And: distinguish NaNs or identify them all?
I lean towards identifying them all, I've never cared for whether they come 
from 0/0, Infinity - Infinity or what, but I could be convinced.