Brandon S. Allbery wrote: > John M. Dlugosz wrote: >> Jon Lang wrote: >>> type (i.e., 'num'). Somehow, I had got it into my head that Num was a >>> role that is done by all types that represent values on the real >>> number line, be they integers, floating-point, rationals, or >>> irrationals. And really, I'd like Num to mean that. I'd rather see >> >> Would you care to muse over that with me: what Roles should we decompose >> the various numeric classes into? Get a good list for organizing the >> standard library functions and writing good generics, and =then= argue over >> huffman encoding for the names. Call them greek things for now so we don't >> confuse anyone <g>. > > Learn from the Haskell folks, who are still trying to untangle the mess they > made of their numeric hierarchy (see > http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Mathematical_prelude_discussion).
I'll look it over. That said, note that we're not dealing with a class hierarchy here; we're dealing with role composition, which needn't be organized into an overarching hierarchal structure to work properly. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
