Prelude: Add List.partition and Natural.{max,maximum,min,minimum,sort}

[sjakobi]

No description provided.

[sjakobi]

sort can quite certainly be optimized further.

[Profpatsch]

min/minimum and max/maximum is not a very human-friendly naming scheme.

[sjakobi]

min/minimum and max/maximum is not a very human-friendly naming scheme.

Works for me I guess – and I'm human. But please propose better names! :)

[Gabriella439]

Note that Prelude.Natural.sort is O(N^2) so in practice it will only handle lists of up to a few-thousand Natural numbers, but we can optimize it in a follow-up change

[Profpatsch]

Works for me I guess – and I'm human. But please propose better names! :)

listMax and listMin e.g.

This is a special case of the Max and Min semigroups.

[sjakobi]

listMin is admittedly clearer than minimum, but it also sounds quite a bit less nice or elegant to me.

Any other opinions on this?

[Profpatsch]

but it also sounds quite a bit less nice or elegant to me.

At least it’s not confusing ;)

[Gabriella439]

I personally liked the current naming scheme (min/max/minimum/maximum), if only because it's consistent with Haskell's naming scheme

[Profpatsch]

I mean it’s pretty easy to discern by its type, which I guess is what motivated the naming in Haskell in the first place.

[joneshf]

What about renaming to:

• Prelude/List/maximum
• Prelude/List/minimum
• Prelude/Natural/maximum
• Prelude/Natural/minimum
  or:
• Prelude/List/max
• Prelude/List/min
• Prelude/Natural/max
• Prelude/Natural/min
  ?

[sjakobi]

@joneshf We will probably soon be able to compare other types apart from Natural, for example Integer. So a List.maximum should IMHO not be specialized to Naturals.

[joneshf]

What would a Prelude/List/maximum be in that world?

[sjakobi]

What would a Prelude/List/maximum be in that world?

It could take a comparison function:

forall (a : Type) -> (a -> a -> Bool) -> List a -> Optional a

or

forall (a : Type) -> (a -> a -> Ordering) -> List a -> Optional a

[neongreen]

if only because it's consistent with Haskell's naming scheme

This doesn't sound like a good guideline to use if we want Dhall to take over the non-Haskell world. (Whether we do is a different question though.)