Proposal: Export Data.Word.Word from Prelude

[Anthony Cowley]

> On Aug 9, 2014, at 9:14 PM, Edward Kmett <ekmett at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm personally very strongly +1 on exporting Word as it is from Data.Word from the Prelude sans bike-shedding.
> 
> Its absence is quite noticeably weird.
> 
> However, I would really prefer to avoid bike-shedding the name of Word.
> 
> The name Word from Data.Word is very well understood across the entire community, whereas both Nat and Natural are both names folks have used consistently for unbounded natural numbers in various flavors.

Many of the conflicts on hackage cited in the proposal are suggestive of the other obvious meaning of the name Word. That is the community as represented by actual data.

Let's first lay to rest the strawman of renaming Word in Data.Word as nobody suggested it, and I doubt anybody seriously wants it. The only breakage on the table is in packages that define Word themselves.

The reason why the name has to at least be thought about here is that adding it to Prelude means that we are not picking a name for a type, we are effectively preventing any other use of that name.

I remain a +1 on the proposal, but I'm very open to hearing from people who would resent having the name taken out of circulation, and I want future generations to look back and respect the angst we all felt about denying them Wordly pleasures.

Anthony

> 
> When I see Nat, I do _not_ think bounded machine word, I think induction. 
> 
> Adding 1 to a Nat to wrap around and get 0 feels very very wrong to me.
> 
> Picking new names just for the sake of picking new names mean that this goes from a no-brainer to something to agonize over. 
> 
> It goes from an easy 2 line patch to something that affects every existing user of Data.Word. There is no clean upgrade path across the GHC version where that export happens.
> 
> If the proposal becomes to export Word as Nat? I think I'm actually then just as equally strongly -1 against it as I am +1 for it right now.
> 
> If and when Herbert's work on working with the strictly positive functions in GMP to make a decent natural number type bear fruit, I'd be happy to have the discussion about exporting that as well, probably as Natural.
> 
> But let's be honest, Int/Integer is more or less a happy coincidence. It's nice that they were already in the culture that way, and that folks were indoctrinated by C and other languages to think of Int as a sort of bounded integer. 
> 
> I'm not really happy with the prospect of breaking everything just to try to get something syntactically similar that _will_ violate expectations.
> 
> There is nothing Natural about a Word.
> 
> -Edward
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 7:21 PM, Niklas Haas <haskell at nand.wakku.to> wrote:
>> On Sat, 09 Aug 2014 23:23:52 +0200, Henning Thielemann <schlepptop at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
>> > How would you name the arbitrary size natural number type, such that it
>> > is consistent with the Integer/Int scheme?
>> 
>> I would honestly go with Natural/Nat.
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