Historical question about type of Data.List.group

[Aaron Denney]

On 2008-08-26, Jim Apple <jbapple+haskell-lib at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why isn't the type of group
>
> Eq a => [a] -> [(a,[a])]
>
> That matches more exactly what group does, and it's easy to see that
> functions like
>
> nubOrd = map fst . group . sort
>
> are clearly safe, whereas
>
> map head . group . sort
>
> is not.

I think the big thing is that while this is safer type, it's also much
harder to use.  Knowing I have a non-empty list is certainly useful
information that can be reasoned about at the type level, but if I
can't pass them easily to normal list functions, it's much less useful.
Perhaps judicious use of typeclasses would make this easier, but I don't
think those were in the original either.  In any case the design space for a
standard prelude that had the normal list type and a non-empty list
type united in a sequence class is rather large, particularly if it's
an open class that new sequence-like data types are expected to be an
instance of.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-