Constraints on definition of `length` should be strengthened

[Nathan Bouscal]

I expect most people probably agree that it'd be nice to have tuples be an
unbiased cartesian product, but the actual fact of the matter is that
tuples as they exist in Haskell are biased. We can't just ignore that and
pretend they're unbiased. It definitely sucks that the answer people would
naively give to "what is a tuple in Haskell" is not the correct answer, but
we're stuck in that situation. The question is how to make the best of it.

On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 12:56 PM, Henning Thielemann <
lemming at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:

>
> On Mon, 3 Apr 2017, Sven Panne wrote:
>
> Of course such an interpretation is possible, but let's remember Abelson's
>> famous quote:
>>
>>    "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally
>> for machines to execute."
>>
>> When you show somebody a pair and ask "What is this?", how many people do
>> you *seriously* expect to say "Oh, yeah, I've seen that: It's a value on
>> the right decorated by another one on the left!" compared to people telling
>> you something about e.g. cartesian products (which are totally symmetric
>> with no bias to the right or left)? The point is: Using a pair for a
>> decorated one-element container is completely miscommunicating your intent,
>> even if you find a sensible mathematical interpretation for it.
>>
>
> That's what I am saying all the time.
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