On Mar 9, 2008, at 1:54 , Don Stewart wrote:
donn:
This seems to me one of the disappointments of Haskell - not just a
detail that was handled in an awkward way, but a fundamental flaw.
I'm not talking about ArrayException, whatever that is, but the
notion
that errors encountered in functional code mustn't be handled as
exceptions.
I don't understand this complaint -- you can handle all these with
Control.Exception.
xmonad catches all these things for example, in user code, to prevent
poorly written modules throwing a pattern match exception, or calling
'error' and making the window manager unstable.
Handling exceptions generated from pure code is just another part of
making systems more robust -- and of course you can do it in Haskell.
I'm unsure what the complaint here is as well.
That exceptions must be handled in IO: an exception is, by
definition, an unexpected condition. These simply can not exist in
the deterministic paradigm of pure code, therefore you must be in IO
(home of all things nondeterministic) to catch them.
That it is preferred to handle known cases without using exceptions:
staying completely pure is cleaner, and gives you more control over
what goes on. And enables swapping in different mechanisms to react
to failure; note how using the Monad instances of Maybe, Either, or
[] allows you to decide how to handle failure (and [] allows you to
support multiple possible results as well, while Maybe and Either
will stop processing at the first.
Basically, the Haskell way is to make as much as possible pure and
minimize the intrusion of IO. Exceptions necessarily complicate
this, so are when possible avoided in favor of pure alternatives,
which are considered better style --- but they are available in IO if
needed.
--
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
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