Haskell 98 - Standard Prelude - Floating Class

[Fergus Henderson]

On 15-Oct-2001, Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
> The proposal is only to give "default declarations"
> in the class defn for sinh, cosh, and perhaps as Lennart suggests
> asinh, acosh, atanh.     They give a reasonable first cut if you
> don't write definitions yourself.  But you can overrride them at will.
> The only reason not to do this (which amounts to giving a default
> decl of "error") is if the default decl is so awful that it's badly
> misleading to provide it.  Which doesn't look true in this case.

Not giving a default definition is *not* the same as giving a default
definition that calls "error".  It's significantly safer.  The difference
is that the former makes it much easier for compilers to issue warnings
when you forget to define a class method in an instance declaration.
With the latter, compilers can't issue such warnings without getting
too many false positives.

The whole idea of letting you omit method definitions for methods with
no default and having calls to such methods be run-time errors is IMHO
exceedingly odd in a supposedly strongly typed language, and IMHO ought
to be reconsidered in the next major revision of Haskell.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  | "... it seems to me that 15 years of
The University of Melbourne         | email is plenty for one lifetime."
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- Prof. Donald E. Knuth