Proposal: Export Data.Word.Word from Prelude

[Michael Snoyman]

On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 4:14 AM, 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.
>
> 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
>
>
>
I agree with Edward completely here. +1 one the original proposal, -1 on
any kind of renaming.

Michael
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/attachments/20140810/3451f1b7/attachment.html>