[Haskell-cafe] adding the elements of two lists

[Chris Smith]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 10:18 AM, Jerzy Karczmarczuk
<jerzy.karczmarczuk at unicaen.fr> wrote:
> So, * the addition* is not invertible, why did you introduce rings ...

My intent was to point out that the Num instance that someone
suggested for Num a => Num [a] was a bad idea.  I talked about rings
because they are the uncontroversial part of the laws associated with
Num: I think everyone would agree that the minimum you should expect
of an instance of Num is that its elements form a ring.

In any case, the original question has been thoroughly answered... the
right answer is that zipWith is far simpler than the code in the
question, and that defining a Num instance is possible, but a bad idea
because there's not a canonical way to define a ring on lists.  The
rest of this seems to have devolved into quite a lot of bickering and
one-ups-manship, so I'll back out now.

-- 
Chris Smith