[Haskell-cafe] adding the elements of two lists

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 27/03/2012, at 5:18 AM, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:

> But I don't care about using (+) = zipWith (+) "anywhere", outside of a programming model / framework, where you keep the sanity of your data. In my programs I KNEW that the length of the list is either fixed, or of some minimal size (or infinite). Your [4,5] simply does not belong to MY rings, if I decided to keep the other one.

And *that* is why I stopped trying to define instance Num t => Num [t].
If "I KNEW that the length of the lists is ... fixed ..." then the type
wasn't *really* [t], but some abstract type that happened to be implemented
as [t], and that abstract type deserved a newtype name of its own.

Naming the type
 - makes the author's intent clearer to readers
 - lets the compiler check it's used consistently
 - lets you have instances that don't match instances for
   other abstract types that happen to have the same implementation
 - provides a natural place to document the purpose of the type
 - gives you a way to enforce the intended restrictions
all for zero run-time overhead.