Data.Ratio and exceptions

[Henning Thielemann]

On Tue, 5 Jun 2012, Kazu Yamamoto (山本和彦) wrote:

> Some functions in Data.Ratio call the error function. The following is
> an example:
>
>    recip (0:%_)        = error "Ratio.%: zero denominator"
>
> We cannot catch this error as ArithException since it is ErrorCall.
> Are there any reasons to not use ArithException?

It is intended that you do not divide by zero, also because it is so 
simple to check it before calling the function. The best solution would 
certainly be a number type that excludes zero values, such that division 
by zero can be catched at compile time. But currently Haskell's type 
system may not be expressive enough to handle this without a lot of 
explicit type conversion.