FW: Haskell 98 report

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

I propose to adopt Olaf's suggestion here.  It makes for
a nice simple specification, even though *in principle*
	data T =3D MkT deriving( Eq )
needn't have a strict (=3D=3D) operation.

It's certainly a vagueness at the moment.

Simon

-----Original Message-----
From: Olaf Chitil [mailto:olaf@cs.york.ac.uk]=20
Sent: 08 February 2002 18:50
To: Simon Peyton-Jones
Subject: Haskell 98 report



In=20

D.1  Derived instances of Eq and Ord.

there is the statement

Derived comparisons always traverse constructors from left to right.
These examples illustrate this property:=20

(1,undefined) =3D=3D (2,undefined) =3D>    False
(undefined,1) =3D=3D (undefined,2) =3D>    _|_


This statement makes me wonder, if for example

False <=3D undefined

should evaluate to True, because False is the least constructor.
However, all Haskell implementations yield "undefined".

To resolve this ambiguity of the report I suggest to add the sentence:
However, all derived comparisons are strict in all arguments.

--=20
OLAF CHITIL,=20
 Dept. of Computer Science, The University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK.=20
 URL: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~olaf/
 Tel: +44 1904 434756; Fax: +44 1904 432767