>> You forgot "confusing"? > I didn't forget it
Sorry, I should have written "omitted". > perhaps we ought to ask what the cause of the confusion is. tr.v. e·nu·mer·at·ed, e·nu·mer·at·ing, e·nu·mer·ates 1. To count off or name one by one; list: A spokesperson enumerated the strikers' demands. 2. To determine the number of; count. Regardless of how easily the children you teach get it, to me enumerating is a different thing from repeatedly adding one. >> Expecting Enum to enumerate all inhabitants of >> a type seems very reasonable to me, and seems to hold for all >> non-floating point types. > Floating point (and fixed point, for that matter) types approximate real > numbers, which of course have no possible enumeration of all values. [..] > It seems to me particularly pointless to define an Enum > instance that focuses on, above all else, the inaccuracy of that > approximation. Yes. But we need an Enum instance to get the syntactic sugar of [1..10], so one is defined anyway. > Perhaps I was understating the case in saying the > behavior was established but undocumented; rather, it's explicitly > documented in the Haskell Report. Absolutely, it is, as I've said, the reality - like it or not. >> Or just avoid Enum, and define "range" or something similar instead. > If Haskell defined list syntax in terms of something that's not called > Enum, that would be fine. Renaming is never all that big a deal. But > the list sugar is a big deal, and I don't think there's any point at all > in leaving the list sugar associated with something as minor as building > a representation of the inaccuracy of your approximations. I must admit I don't understand this comment. If the fixpoint library wants to provide the functionality (producing all values between two points), and can't/shouldn't use Enum, surely it must provide a different function, and let go of the list sugar? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
