On 12 Nov 2010, at 20:21, Andrew Coppin wrote:
On 11/11/2010 08:43 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
If length, map, and so on had always been part of a Sequence
typeclass, people would not now be talking about
It's always puzzled me that Haskell's standard containers almost
completely lack any way to use them polymorphically.
On the contrary, there is the Edison package of containers and
algorithms, since at least the late 90's, which has type classes for
all of the common operations. It is high quality, and kind-of the
"ideal standard" in an academic sort of way, except that almost nobody
uses it. In particular, ghc did not use it internally, choosing
Data.Map instead, and the legendary suspicion of programmers who
refuse to use a alternative library replacing one that already comes
with their compiler, means that nobody else did either. Either that,
or people find it awkward to deal with the substantial extra
hierarchies of type classes.
Edison-API and Edison-core are available on hackage by the way.
Regards,
Malcolm
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