> Dear Kevin Hammond
>
> If you think this flame not too intemperate, please put it out on
> the haskell mailing list.
Don't blame Kevin!
You're not the first one who complains about the Prelude being
structured in the wrong way. Unfortunately the Haskell class
system isn't powerful enough to express what you want.
E.g., a ring is an abelian group with an additional
semi-group structure. But an abelian group also has a semi-group
structure in it, so now we have two of them. And there is no
good way of expression this in Haskell.
But basically I think you are right. The Prelude was designed with
numerical computations in mind (which doesn't mean that the
designers were ignorant of other areas).
-- Lennart
