[Haskell-cafe] Are there arithmetic composition of functions?

[Conal Elliott]

This general applicative pattern for numbers is packed up in the
applicative-numbers package [1].

In addition to Ralf's paper, there's a discussion in section 10 of
*Denotational design with type class morphisms* [2] and an application in
sections 2 & 4 of *Beautiful differentiation* [3].

[1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/applicative-numbers
[2]: http://conal.net/papers/type-class-morphisms/
[3]: http://conal.net/papers/beautiful-differentiation/

-- Conal

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 9:58 PM, wren ng thornton <wren at freegeek.org> wrote:

> On 3/19/12 12:57 PM, sdiyazg at sjtu.edu.cn wrote:
>
>> By arithmetic I mean the everyday arithmetic operations used in
>> engineering.
>> In signal processing for example, we write a lot of expressions like
>> f(t)=g(t)+h(t)+g'(t) or f(t)=g(t)*h(t).
>> I feel it would be very natural to have in haskell something like
>>
>
> You should take a look at Ralf Hinze's _The Lifting Lemma_:
>
>    http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ralf.**hinze/WG2.8/26/slides/ralf.pdf<http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ralf.hinze/WG2.8/26/slides/ralf.pdf>
>
> The fact that you can lift arithmetic to work on functions comes from the
> fact that for every type T, the type (T->) is a monad and therefore is an
> applicative functor. The output type of the function doesn't matter, except
> inasmuch as the arithmetic operations themselves care.
>
>
> This pattern has been observed repeatedly, even long before Haskell was
> around. But one reason it's not too common in production Haskell code is
> that it's all too easy to make a mistake when programming (e.g., you don't
> mean to be adding functions but you accidentally forget some argument), and
> if you're using this trick implicitly by providing a Num instance, then you
> can get arcane/unexpected/unhelpful error messages during type checking.
>
> But then you do get some fun line noise :)
>
>    twiceTheSumOf  = (+) + (+)
>    squareTheSumOf = (+) * (+)
>    cubeTheSumOf   = (+) * (+) * (+)
>
>    -- N.B., the names only make sense if all arguments
>    -- are numeric literals. Don't look at the types.
>    addThreeThings = (+) . (+)
>    addFourThings  = (+) . (+) . (+)
>    addFiveThings  = (+) . (+) . (+) . (+)
>
> --
> Live well,
> ~wren
>
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/**mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe<http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20120321/b6c6ebff/attachment.htm>