Meta-point: backward compatibility

[Aaron Denney]

On 2008-04-30, Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 08:18:10PM +0000, Aaron Denney wrote:
>> And there is a lot that clearly isn't battle tested in a reasonable new
>> form, though the current practice is widely agreed upon to be broken.
>> Examples include all monads having fail, rather than only those in a
>> subclass, monad not being a subclass of functor, and the whole numeric
>> hierarchy issue (which I don't think can be properly designed unless we
>> know whether it's going to be FDs or ATs, though, of course, designing
>> it for either would provide valuable experience for the limitations
>> of both),
>
> I don't think any of these need involve multi-parameter type classes
> (we don't need vector spaces in the Prelude), but they're often presented
> as use cases for things like class aliases.  Even then, the numeric
> hierarchy is probably easier to fix that the others: one can define a
> finer-grain hierarchy with the existing classes as a facade, and leave
> clients untouched.  The change would be felt by the minority defining
> instances of numeric classes, but they are exactly the people who find
> the present hierarchy inadequate.

Class aliases (or the ability to add superclasses) would certainly help
in letting many of these things be more easily tested.

I suppose we don't need vector spaces.  Nor do we need rationals,
complex numbers, or even arbitrarily large integers.  Nevertheless,
there is a huge benefit to having the interfaces for them there.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-