Haskell High Performance Programming

Handling numerical data

Like all general-purpose programming languages, Haskell too has a few different number types. Unlike other languages, the number types in Haskell are organized into a hierarchy via type classes. This gives us two things:

• Check sat compiletime we aren't doing anything insane with numbers
• The ability to write polymorphic functions in the number type with enhanced type safety

An example of an insane thing would be dividing an integer by another integer, expecting an integer as a result. And because every integral type is an instance of the Integral class, we can easily write a factorial function that doesn't care what the underlying type is (as long as it represents an integer):

factorial :: Integral a => a -> a factorial n = ...