realToFrac issues

[John Meacham]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 12:44:04AM -0500, Cale Gibbard wrote:
> I'm almost scared to ask: does this mean we need negative zero as well?

good point. probably.

> This change means that Rational is no longer a field. It makes me feel
> uneasy at least. Should we really expect realToFrac to propagate those
> values? Look at its type:
> realToFrac     :: (Real a, Fractional b) => a -> b
> Nothing about the Fractional class would seem to indicate that NaN and
> +-Infinity should be representable. In fact, it just looks like the
> basic field operations, and fields don't tend to have such elements
> (not that we require the field axioms to hold for every instance).

It makes me uneasy too. Perhaps we can come up with something better.

> I personally don't see any reason that realToFrac should propagate the
> special error condition values of IEEE floating point types. Given its
> type, I'd expect it to throw an exception.

well, the main reason is that it is the only way we have to convert
between various floating point types. If we can come up with another
mechanism then perhaps that is a better solution, but it is not at all
obvious to me what that other mechanism would be.


        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈