Burning more bridges (mostly numeric ones)

[wren romano]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Corey O'Connor <coreyoconnor at gmail.com> wrote:
> On #3: The library numeric-prelude achieves many of these goals (Plus a
> bunch more). If the experiences of using numeric-prelude are positive then
> using this or a subset of this as the standard numeric prelude might resolve
> these goals easily.
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/package/numeric-prelude

One of my major complaints against numeric-prelude is the same as my
major complaint against every other such project I've seen put
forward: they completely ignore semirings and related structures.

Semirings are utterly ubiquitous and this insistence that every notion
of addition comes equipped with subtraction is ridiculous. In my work
I deal with semirings and semimodules on a daily basis, whereas
rings/modules show up far less often, let alone fields/vectorspaces.
When not dealing with semirings, the other structures I work with are
similarly general (e.g., semigroups, quasigroups,...). But this entire
area of algebra is completely overlooked by those libraries which
start at abelian groups and then run headlong for normed Euclidean
vector spaces.

My main complaint against the Num class is that it already assumes too
much structure. So developing the hierarchy even further up than Num
does little to help me.

-- 
Live well,
~wren