Proposal: Add "fma" to the RealFloat class

[Tikhon Jelvis]

Would it make sense to create a new class for operations like fma that has
accuracy guarantees as part of its typeclass laws? Or would managing a
bunch of typeclasses like that create too much syntactic, conceptual or
performance overhead for actual use?

To me, that seems like it could be better than polluting Num—which, after
all, features prominently in the Prelude—but it might make for worse
discoverability.

If we do add it to Num, I strongly support having a default implementation.
We don't want to make implementing a custom numeric type any more difficult
than it has to be, and somebody unfamiliar with fma would just manually
implement it without any optimizations anyhow or just leave it out,
incomplete instantiation warnings nonwithstanding. Num is already a bit to
big for casual use (I rarely care about signum and abs myself), so making
it *bigger* is not appealing.

Personally, I'm a bit torn on the naming. Something like mulAdd or
fusedMultiplyAdd is great for non-experts, but it feels like fma is
something that we only expect experts to care about, so perhaps it's better
to name it in line with their expectations.

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 10:52 AM, David Feuer <david.feuer at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm somewhat opposed to the Num class in general, and very much opposed to
> calling floating point representations "numbers" in particular. How are
> they numbers when they don't obey associative or distributive laws, let
> alone cancellation, commutativity, ....? I know Carter disagrees with me,
> but I'll stand my ground, resolute! I suppose adding some more nonsense
> into the trash heap won't do too much more harm, but I'd much rather see
> some deeper thought about how we want to deal with floating point.
> On May 1, 2015 1:35 PM, "adam vogt" <vogt.adam at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The Num class is defined in GHC.Num, so Prelude could import GHC.Num
>> hiding (fma) to avoid having another round of prelude changes breaking code.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Twan van Laarhoven <twanvl at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I agree that Num is the place to put this function, with a default
>>> implementation. In my mind it is a special combination of (+) and (*),
>>> which both live in Num as well.
>>>
>>> I dislike the name fma, as that is a three letter acronym with no
>>> meaning to people who don't do numeric programming. And by putting the
>>> function in Num the name would end up in the Prelude.
>>>
>>> For further bikeshedding: my proposal for a name would mulAdd. But
>>> fusedMulAdd or fusedMultiplyAdd would also be fine.
>>>
>>>
>>> Twan
>>>
>>>
>>> On 2015-04-30 00:19, Ken T Takusagawa wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wed, 29 Apr 2015, Edward Kmett wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  Good point. If we wanted to we could push this all the way up to Num
>>>>> given the operations
>>>>> involved, and I could see that you could benefit from it there for
>>>>> types that have nothing
>>>>> to do with floating point, e.g. modular arithmetic could get away with
>>>>> using a single 'mod'.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I too advocate this go in Num.  The place I anticipate
>>>> seeing fma being used is in some polymorphic linear algebra
>>>> library, and it is not uncommon (having recently done this
>>>> myself) to do linear algebra on things that aren't
>>>> RealFloat, e.g., Rational, Complex, or number-theoretic
>>>> fields.
>>>>
>>>> --ken
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