2533: Generic functions that take integral arguments should work the same way as their prelude counterparts

David Roundy daveroundy at gmail.com
Wed Aug 27 12:54:26 EDT 2008


On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 3:19 AM, Henning Thielemann
<lemming at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, John Meacham wrote:
>> But is also makes the functions less useful and another source of
>> non-completeness. I certainly always considered accepting negative
>> numbers a feature of those functions and not an infelicity.  Sometimes
>> you want 'drop 1 xs' and other times you want 'tail xs' (or equivalent).
>
> It's very confusing for readers of your programs, if you use 'drop 1'
> instead of 'tail'. The names 'drop' and 'tail' don't give the reader a hint,
> that 'drop' works for empty lists and 'tail' doesn't. 'drop 1' and 'tail'
> should behave identically for empty lists and a function with different
> behaviour should have a different name.

Personally, I'd prefer to see tail dropped from the Prelude (not any
time soon, of course).  The fewer incomplete functions are in the
Prelude, the better, and drop has very nice and easy-to-understand
behavior.  Folks who want to crash on empty lists should write their
own or use pattern matching.

David


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