(!!) operator with overflowing integer

Question

I have just recently started learning Haskell and started playing around with the idea of infinite lists and lazy evaluation. I constructed an infinite list and tried to access an element at a very, very distant index using the !! operator. The issue is that the type signature for the !! operator is the following:

(!!) :: [a] -> Int -> a

Which means it takes an Int as an index to retrieve that element from the list.

Now, my problem occurs whenever I try to index something so distant that it overflow the Int and therefore goes negative. What would then be the proper Haskell way of doing this?

Answer 1

Data.List.genericIndex supports using any Integral number to index, so you can use Integer if you want.