RFC: general sequences

[Ross Paterson]

On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 10:22:38PM +0200, Benjamin Franksen wrote:
> On Monday 23 May 2005 18:41, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> > at least, it will be great to have analogues of length, map, filter,
> > partition and a number of other operations defined in classes and
> > supported for variety of data structures. i think it's omission in
> > H98 standard that this names belongs only to lists and not defined in
> > some classes like (+) and (>)
> 
> A agree completely. Almost all of the functions in Data.Seq have the 
> same name and type signature (modulo the data type) and provide the 
> same functionality as the corresponding ones for lists (in the 
> Prelude). A type class Sequence to capture these common features would 
> be great. It would also mean we can import module Sequence unqualified. 
> A problem is that the names conflict with the ones from the Prelude, so 
> that this style can only be used when hiding all the list stuff from 
> Prelude.

This can't be fixed by adding a new class.  We can't change the type of
Prelude.length, and that includes generalizing it.  The only alterative
to hiding/qualification is to give our functions different names.