On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 08:53:22PM +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote: > On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, David Roundy wrote: > >It seems that you're arguing that (**) is placed in the correct class, > >since it's with the transcendental functions, and is implemented in terms > >of those transcendental functions. Where is the abomination here? > > (**) should not exist, because there is no sensible definition for many > operands for real numbers, and it becomes even worse for complex numbers. > The more general the exponent, the more restricted is the basis and vice > versa in order to get sound definitions.
Would you also prefer to eliminate sqrt and log? We've been using these functions for years (in other languages) without difficulty, and I don't see why this has changed. I think it's quite sensible, for instance, that passing a negative number as the first argument of (**) with the second argument non-integer leads to a NaN. -- David Roundy Department of Physics Oregon State University _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
