Slavomir Kaslev wrote:
I have to define a couple of float2, float3, float4 Cg, HLSL style
vectors in Haskell. At first I was tempted to make them instances of
Num, Floating, RealFrac, etc. but some of the functions defined in
those classes have no sense for vectors.
I'd suggest that this implies that these classes are not suitable for
Vectors.
One such example is signum from class Num.
There are several workarounds for this. One may come up with some
meaning for vectors of such functions, for example:
instance Num Float3 where
.....
signum a | a == Float3 0 0 0 = 0
| otherwise = 1
This looks a bit unnatural. Also, testing equality of Floats is not
generally recommended.
[snip]
I know that I can scrap all those Num, Floating, RealFrac, etc.
classes and define class Vector from scratch, but I really don't want
to come up and use different names for +, -, etc. that will bloat the
code.
While it may be tempting to want to use symbolic operators like + and -,
these quickly become very confusing when more distinctions need to be made
(eg between cross product, dot product, and scaling, or between transforming
a position versus transforming a direction) so I'd argue that for
readability descriptive names are better than symbols:
class Num a => Vector v a where
plus :: v a -> v a -> v a
minus :: v a -> v a -> v a
cross :: v a -> v a -> v a
dot :: v a -> v a -> a
scale :: a -> v a -> v a
magSquared :: v a -> a
class Num a => Transform mat vec a where
transformPosition :: mat a -> vec a -> vec a
transformDirection :: mat a -> vec a -> vec a
instance Num a => Transform Mat44 Vec4 a where
-- ...
If you're doing matrix transformations, you might also like to consider
using separate PositionN and DirectionN types instead of VecN to make use of
the type system to catch some math bugs but I haven't looked into this
myself yet so I don't know whether this would be practical or not.
Best regards,
Brian.
--
http://www.metamilk.com
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