PROPOSAL: Add 'Natural' type to base:Data.Word

[Mario Blažević]

On 13/11/14 05:35 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 5:20 PM, Mario Blažević <mblazevic at stilo.com 
> <mailto:mblazevic at stilo.com>> wrote:
>
>     Regarding the partial vs. saturated negation, I'm in favour of the
>     former. However, there is another option nobody mentioned so far: NaN
>
>
> NaN is only defined in the context of IEEE floating point; as such, it 
> is not available for this use.

     I'm aware of the current uses of NaN. I was just suggesting that 
the same concept could be used for operations on natural values that go 
out of band. Just like we have

    isNaN :: RealFloat a => a -> Bool

we could add a function

    isUnnatural :: Natural -> Bool

and replace exceptions by an unnatural Natural values... I'm open to an 
alternative terminology. The important question is whether this approach 
is feasible for the implementation.