Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
[It is a philosophical question, not a practical programming problem.]
I'm used, in imperative programming languages with exceptions (like
Python) to call any function without fear of stopping the program
because I can always catch the exceptions with things like (Python):
while not over:
try:
code which may raise an exception...
except Exception e:
do something clever
How to do it in Haskell? How can I call functions like Prelude.head
while being sure my program won't stop, even if I call head on an
empty list (thus calling "error")?
Here's another way of looking at it, that I've grown fond of.
If your program is a total function, then there should be no exceptions.
That is, if you properly model the world, in all its messiness, then you
can write a function that maps every instance of the world to some valid
output, even if that output is ``Sorry.''
It might seem a daunting task, but liberal use of the Maybe class from
the ground up helps. We have suffered through quite a bit of this with
our hardware detector, where unexpected situations are the norm. My
colleague David Fox has spent considerable time computing reasonable
answers in seemingly impossible situations, to the point where you
cannot turn around without bumping into a Maybe construct.
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