Fawzi Mohamed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Vectors don't act like numbers, a vector space is not a > field, even if they have some common operations.
That's a long-standing flaw in the design of numeric classes. It's not a problem with typeclasses per se. > I find it misleading to define something a number when it > does not satisfy all the properties of numbers. Justifiably so. But if you had a class Additive, would you be unhappy about defining (+) on non-numbers? > The numerical prelude might fix this, but still I think that > class and overloading should be distinct concepts. I think the problem here is that you are using the word class to mean something different from Haskell classes. Haskell typeclasses /are/ overloading, and that's what I understand them as. They were originally introduced as a solution to the question of how to handle equality so that one didn't have to use different names for the same concept on different types. -- Jón Fairbairn [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.chaos.org.uk/~jf/Stuff-I-dont-want.html (updated 2006-09-13) _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe