On Fri, 24 Mar 2006, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
Daniel McAllansmith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Unless I've missed it, there is no typeclass for positive integers in
GHC. Is there any particular reason it doesn't exist?
Also, it seems Word would be a far better type in the likes of (!!),
length, etc. Is it just tradition that resulted in the use of Int?
There is a good argument that what you really want here is the lazy
infinite natural numbers. Think Peano:
data Natural = Zero | Succ Natural
The clear correspondance between lazy lists and the size/index of a lazy
list makes this type fairly compelling. It can be jolly useful,
particularly with infinite streams, to be able to compute
(length xs > n)
without forcing the evaluation of the list to more than n places.
Fortunately there are already List functions like genericLength and
genericTake, which can handle such a number type. Shouldn't be Peano
numbers part of the standard libraries?
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