[Haskell-cafe] Num is such a fat and greedy class

[Dan Weston]

The following observations are not new, insightful, or gracious, but I
was lusting after the innocent +,-,* operators for my own evil ends and
was mildly curious why...

Num is such a fat and greedy class. If you want to marry Cinderella, you
have to take her ugly stepsisters too.

1) Groups may only want to define addition. Why can't they use +
(instead of <+>, >++++?&**+>, or other such perversion)?

2) Affine spaces have a (-) but no (+). Worse, the signature might be
(-) :: Point -> Point -> Vector, which doesn't unify with (a -> a -> a).

Wouldn't the following be more useful/general?

class Subtraction a b | a -> b where
  (-) :: a -> a -> b

Or would this require needless type annotation for the common subset of
(a -> a -> a) instances?

3) Quaternions have no signum, unit quaternions have (*), (/) but no (+)
or (-), abs would have a different signatures  (Quaternion -> Double)
which doesn't unify with (a -> a), and fields cannot be scaled with (*)
as in  (*) :: (Field f) => Double -> f -> f

Would it not make sense to put each of these operators (division too)
into their own individual superclasses that Num inherits? My (obviously
naive) philosophy about type classes is that operations should be
bundled only when they are mutually recursive (i.e. there is more than
one useful minimal definition). If there is just one minimal set of
operations, they can be in their own parent class too.

Then again, I should get over my lust and stick with my own operators
<+++++++++>, <---------------------->, and <*******>. Not too pretty,
but they have a wonderful personality all their own!

Dan