[Haskell-cafe] transcoding - Haskell?!

[Henning Thielemann]

On Sun, 14 Jun 2020, Joachim Durchholz wrote:

> Am 14.06.20 um 12:25 schrieb Henning Thielemann:
>> 
>> This would still be helpful. Imagine we transcode LAPACK to Haskell. It 
>> would be still FORTRAN or C encoded in Haskell with the same old FORTRAN 
>> API, but we can easily generalize the code to any floating point number 
>> type that any Haskell library provides, e.g. numbers with extended 
>> precision, with decimal numbers or with interval arithmetics.
>
> So... I tend to be scared if somebody claims to generalize 
> floating-point code. Either because that person knows too little, or 
> because that person knows so much more than me that they actually know 
> how to deal with these complications :-)

I expect that code that works for both Float and Double has already 
factored out precision-dependent constants.

I have not claimed and do not expect that generalization can happen 
automatically. I just say that even a dumb conversion from FORTRAN to 
Haskell can be the first step to (manual) generalization in Haskell.