[Haskell-cafe] linear: instance Additive (Point f) ??

[Brent Yorgey]

Sorry for the delay in responding.  I am not sure what it would mean to
multiply matrices where one or both dimensions are given by Points.
Indeed, such things seem very strange, precisely because Points are not
additive.  I am certainly in favor of removing the instance, and I doubt
anyone will miss being able to make Point-structured matrices.

-Brent

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 1:23 PM Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 10:41 PM, Brent Yorgey <byorgey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I have EXACTLY the same question.  We recently switched from vector-space
>> to linear for diagrams.  There are quite a lot of reasons why this works
>> really well for us.  But I was very sad to find that we can now add points,
>> which indeed we do not want to be able to do.  At least there are still
>> different types for points and vectors, which allows transformations like
>> 'translate' to act on them differently, which I actually find to be much
>> more critical from a correctness point of view.
>>
>> I have had a brief explanation, but I forget the exact details.
>> Something about 'Additive' not really being about 'additive groups' but
>> instead being a superclass of Applicative.  I remember being convinced at
>> least that it's a "pick your poison" sort of choice, i.e. removing the
>> Additive instance for Point would make certain other things ugly/annoying.
>> Hopefully someone else can chime in with more detail.
>>
>>
> The name Additive is a bit of a misnomer, like you said. The real reason
> it exists is to support matrix operations on both sparse/dense matrices.
>
> Matrix multiplication looks like:
>
> (!*!) :: (Functor m, Foldable t, Additive t, Additive n, Num a) => m (t
> a) -> t (n a) -> m (n a)
>
> Without that instance you'd be unable to build matrices with Point's as
> one or both of the dimensions, which are intended to transform points.
>
> If we can decide that that doesn't make sense (as after all points aren't
> additive), so such matrices _are_ kinda weird, we can remove the instance.
>
> I'm happy to bend the way Point works, as I stick to the projective
> machinery almost exclusively, myself.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -Edward
>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 5:47 PM Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi café,
>>>
>>> I'm in the middle of responding to https://github.com/goldfirere/
>>> units/pull/45 and trying to learn the `linear` package, which I have
>>> yet to use.
>>>
>>> I have what may be a basic question: why is there an `instance Additive
>>> f => Additive (Point f)` (in the Affine module)? It would seem that the
>>> whole point of Point is that it is *not* Additive. We don't want to add
>>> Points!
>>>
>>> Could someone enlighten me?
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>> Richard
>>>
>>> PS: Of course, this instance is directly hurting my use of the package.
>>> But it is hurting my understanding of the package, because it disagrees
>>> with the mental model I've built up of the definitions.
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>>
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