Proposal: Add a few extra members to Foldable and Traversable classes

[David Feuer]

Joachim, you may be right about sum and product; I really don't know.
Henning: this doesn't change the Data.Foldable API at all. Data.Foldable
already exports all of these functions, and the class would give each of
them a valid default implementation. I thoroughly agree with you about the
peril of using RULES to specialize a function to a typeclass instance. As
well as being hard to predict, potentially perilous, and inapplicable to
polymorphic recursive situations, RULES also privilege "built-in" types
over identical user-defined ones.

On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 4:29 PM, Henning Thielemann <
lemming at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:

>
> On Fri, 19 Sep 2014, Joachim Breitner wrote:
>
>  Slightly off topic: Wouldn’t it be nice if we would not have to have to
>> add these methods to provide optimized behavior, but rather have the
>> user write "sum . toList" or some other idiomatic code (maybe suggested
>> in the docs), and RULES provided by the container implementer would
>> reliable replace this with the optimized version. Wouldn’t help in
>> polymorphic code, but I doubt that much performance critical code is
>> polymorphic in the container.
>>
>> But then he could simply provide a sumTree or sumSet or something
>> else... I should stop mumbling in circles.
>>
>
> I am also worried about extending the classes more and more. Where to
> stop? At which point the API will be stable? A way to optimize non-methods
> for certain instances would be nice. Unfortunately, it is not only hard to
> predict when RULES fire, a RULES based solution is also dangerous. If a
> default method implementation and an actual instance implementation do
> different things, that's ok. In contrast, if a function is replaced by
> different functionality via RULES, that's very bad.
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