opPow, opDollar

[Stewart Gordon]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Matti Niemenmaa wrote:
>> Don wrote:
>>> Yes, ^^ hasn't been used for exponentiation before. Fortran used ** 
>>> because it had such a limited character set, but it's not really a 
>>> natural choice; the more mathematically-oriented languages use ^. 
>>> Obviously C-family languages don't have that possibility.
>>
>> Haskell has three exponentiation operators in the standard library: ^, 
>> ^^, and **. They are for non-negative integral exponents, integral 
>> exponents, and floating-point exponents respectively.
> 
> I wonder whether that's an illustration of the power or of the failure 
> of function overloading. (Seriously.)

I'm not sure either.  I don't speak Haskell, but my guess is that ^ and 
^^ were meant to cut out the confusion that would happen if Word32 ^ 
Word32 (what weird naming conventions Haskell has!) returned an integer 
type but Int32 ^ Int32 returned a floating point type.

But why it needs yet another for floating-point exponents, I don't know. 
  Maybe Haskell supports only IFTI rather than true function overloading.

Stewart.