Generic number type
Problem
Question:
Can I have a generic numeric data type in Haskell which covers Integer
, Rational
, Double
and so on, like it is done in scripting languages like Perl and MatLab?
Answer: In principle you can define a type like
data GenericNumber =
Integer Integer
| Rational Rational
| Double Double
and define appropriate instances for Num
class et. al.
However you will find that it is difficult to implement these methods in a way that is appropriate for each use case.
There is simply no type that can emulate the others.
Floating point numbers are imprecise - a/b*b==a
does not hold in general.
Rationals are precise but pi
and sqrt 2
are not rational.
That is, when using GenericNumber
s you will encounter exactly the problems
that all scripting language users have encountered so far (or ignored :-).
A GenericNumber
type would also negate the type safety that strongly typed numbers provide, putting the burden back on the programmer to make sure they are using numbers in a type-safe way. This can lead to subtle and hard-to-find bugs, for example, if some code ends up comparing two floating-point values for equality (usually a bad idea) without the programmer realizing it.
Idiomatic solutions
It is strongly advised to carefully check whether a GenericNumber
is indeed useful for your application.
So let's revisit some examples and their idiomatic solutions in plain Haskell 98.
average
You may find it cumbersome to manually convert integers to fractional number types like in
average :: Fractional a => [a] -> a
average xs = sum xs / fromIntegral (length xs)
and you may prefer
average :: [GenericNumber] -> GenericNumber
average xs = sum xs / genericNumberLength xs
with an appropriate implementation of genericNumberLength
.
However, there is already Data.List.genericLength
and you can write
average :: Fractional a => [a] -> a
average xs = sum xs / genericLength xs
ratios
You find it easy to write
1 / 3 :: Rational
but uncomfortable that
1 / floor pi :: Rational
does not work.
The first example works, because the numeric literals 1
and 3
are interpreted as rationals itself.
The second example fails, because floor
always returns an Integral
number type, where Rational
is not an instance.
You should use %
instead. This constructs a fraction out of two integers:
1 % 3 :: Rational
1 % floor pi :: Rational
isSquare
It may seem irksome that fromIntegral
is required in the function
isSquare :: (Integral a) => a -> Bool
isSquare n = (round . sqrt $ fromIntegral n) ^ 2 == n
With a GenericNumber
type, one could instead write
isSquare :: GenericNumber -> Bool
isSquare n = (round . sqrt $ n) ^ 2 == n
but there is a subtle problem here: if the input happens to be represented internally by a non-integral type, this function will probably not work properly. This could be fixed by wrapping all occurrences of n
by calls to round
, but that's no easier (and less type-safe) than just including the call to fromIntegral
in the first place. The point is that by using GenericNumber
here, all opportunities for the type checker to warn you of problems is lost; now you, the programmer, must ensure that the underlying numeric types are always used correctly, which is made even harder by the fact that you can't inspect them.
squareRoot
Closely related is the (floor of the) square root of integers. It is tempting to implement
squareRoot :: Integer -> Integer
squareRoot = floor . sqrt . (fromIntegral :: Integer -> Double)
or to convert to Double
automatically in an implementation of sqrt
for GenericNumber
.
This will not work for several reasons:
- For a square number,
sqrt
may give a result slightly below an integer, whichfloor
will round down to the next integer. fromIntegral
will not preserve the (arbitrary high) precision ofInteger
s and thus will not give precise results.fromIntegral
may exceed the maximum exponent of the floating point representation and fail with an overflow error orInfinity
result.
That is, fromIntegral
is of no help here.
The most efficient way is to call the native implementation of the square root of GNU's multiprecision library.
(How to do that?)
The most portable way is to implement a square root algorithm from scratch.
(^!) :: Num a => a -> Int -> a
(^!) x n = x^n
squareRoot :: Integer -> Integer
squareRoot 0 = 0
squareRoot 1 = 1
squareRoot n =
let twopows = iterate (^!2) 2
(lowerRoot, lowerN) =
last $ takeWhile ((n>=) . snd) $ zip (1:twopows) twopows
newtonStep x = div (x + div n x) 2
iters = iterate newtonStep (squareRoot (div n lowerN) * lowerRoot)
isRoot r = r^!2 <= n && n < (r+1)^!2
in head $ dropWhile (not . isRoot) iters
See also
- Converting numbers
- The discussion on haskell-cafe which provided the impetus for this page: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-June/027092.html