[Haskell-cafe] better error expression in IO function

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Jul 11, 2007, at 20:10 , Jeremy Shaw wrote:

> At Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:18:14 +1000,
> Thomas Conway wrote:
>>
>> On 7/12/07, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
>>> It's fairly common to use the Either type for this. By convention,
>>> "Right" means "correct", and by elimination "Left" means an error...
>>
>> Presumably, this is because the world is dominated by dull,
>> conventional, right handed people. :-)
>
> Personally, I blame it on the Romans.
>
>   The English word "sinister" comes from the Latin word
>   "sinister,-tra,-trum", which originally meant "left" but took on
>   meanings of "evil" or "unlucky" by the Classical Latin era[1].

Dig deeper; it far predates the Romans.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH