Overflow in Ratio

[David Benbennick]

On 7/22/07, haskell at list.mightyreason.com <haskell at list.mightyreason.com> wrote:
> I am going to take a guess and say that the library policy is that (Num Integer)
>   and (Ratio Integer) are known to follow the axioms, but anyone who uses
> (Num Int) and (Ratio Int) did so to get the size and performance and does not
> want to cast to Integer.

The current implementation of < for Ratio Int is no better than a coin
flip.  That is, if you take two elements of Ratio Int at random and
compare them with <, the answer will be right 50% of the time, and
wrong 50% of the time.  I would assume that if someone is comparing
two elements of Ratio Int with <, they're doing so because they want
the right answer.  If they don't care what answer they get, they can
just assume True and be even more efficient.

Also, I don't think it's generally well known that the overflow
problems are as bad as they are.  For example, the documentation at
http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Data-Ratio.html
doesn't include any warnings that Ratio Int doesn't obey the
documented behavior of Ord.