[Haskell-cafe] haskell programming guidelines

[John Meacham]

On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 12:39:27PM -0500, Cale Gibbard wrote:
> I look at the above as generating a proof obligation for me as the
> programmer that the lookup will never fail, or at least the ability to
> convince myself. :) If you want to handle errors, you should actually
> handle them, not let your users get "Irrefutable pattern failed"
> messages. Also, if someone else later comes along and wants to catch
> that error, they have to either do it in IO, which can be fiddly if
> the error occurs deep in the evaluation of some structure, or they
> refactor your code so that it returns the error explicitly. Sure,
> irrefutable pattern matches are useful, but they shouldn't be used if
> you expect they'll ever fail.

Ah, perhaps I wasn't clear. I don't ever expect these to fail. The
reason I prefer irrefutable pattern matches to handwritten 'error'
messages (at first) is so many months later when I introduce a subtle
heisenbug I don't get a 

error: This shouldn't happen
or worse
error: Prelude.undefined

but rather a nice error pointing right to the line number.

anything I ever expect to fail for any reason other than a bug I put in
a failing Monad with a suitably user digestable error message. So, I was
comparing them to handwritten 'error' messages for announcing
programming bugs. not handwritten 'error' messages for users to see
(which really should be using 'fail' in a monad anyway).

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈