Break `abs` into two aspects

[Carter Schonwald]

Num doesn't have Ord as a parent constraint any more ... Though i suppose
that works as a default signature instance?

On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 3:19 PM Mario Blažević <mblazevic at stilo.com> wrote:

> On 2020-02-04 11:32 a.m., Zemyla wrote:
> > It really doesn't matter if it's not "interesting" or not surjective for
> > some Semirings. It should be included, because:
>
>         I fully agree, and I'll add another reason you left out. The
> presence
> of fromNatural would allow defaulting of Num's fromInteger as
>
>  > fromInteger i
>  >     | i >= 0 = fromNatural (fromInteger i)
>  >     | otherwise = negate . fromInteger . negate $ i
>
>
> > (a) Even for semirings where it is "interesting", it's not surjective
> > (for instance, Rational or Double)
> > (b) It's a method with a default definition, so you don't have to expend
> > any mental effort on it
> > (c) A lot of instances have uninteresting methods: for instance, (*>)
> > and (<*) for Applicative ((->) e) are const id and const respectively.
> > Haskell adds methods to classes when they're always possible and
> > sometimes useful/interesting/faster, rather than when they're always
> > interesting.
> > (d) It's useful for Semiring-generic methods and instances.
> > (e) It can achieve an asymptotic speedup on some instances. Like, if you
> > have Semiring a => Semiring (f a) for some type f, then you can have
> > fromNatural n = pure (fromNatural n) instead of doing the whole O(log n)
> > song and dance with the default definition. Also, your example admits a
> > simple definition:
> >    fromNatural n = if n == 0 then S.empty else S.singleton True
> > (f) "zero" and "one" can be defined in terms of fromNatural, for
> > programmers who only need to define that:
> >    zero = fromNatural 0
> >    one = fromNatural 1
> > This leads to the MINIMAL pragma on Semiring being {-# MINIMAL plus,
> > times, (zero, one | fromNatural) #-}
> > (g) If it's not included in the class, but in some subclass
> > (NaturalSemiring, you proposed), but it's possible from the class, then
> > people will just define and use the O(log n) version instead of
> > requiring the subclass, leading to wasted effort and duplicated code.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Libraries mailing list
> Libraries at haskell.org
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libraries
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/attachments/20200205/a64957ea/attachment.html>