Lyndon Maydwell
I agree that it seems uncomfortable for a seemingly pure function to require handling exceptions in the IO monad, but if the code in question really does have the capability of raising IO exceptions, then I think it is reasonable to consider it as impure and belonging in the IO monad and that it probably should not have been given a pure type signature to start with.
No, pure computations can throw Haskell exceptions just fine, and the exceptions can be caught and handled without IO. Using Either SomeException instead of IO is the recommended way to do it.
I'd double check to see if the function in question has the capability of raising an exception in a more pure monad as per Kees's suggestion. The other option is to perform the actions I've suggested and then wrap the whole lot in unsafePerformIO to make it pure again but with a new signature of (a -> Either YourException b), however that just makes me feel even more queazy...
That's about the worst solution you could consider. It's not a valid use case for unsafePerformIO. You can just use Either right away. I don't understand why you insist on IO and use hazardously unsafe constructs to satisfy the insistence. There is a natural transformation from Either SomeException to IO: liftEither :: (Exception e) => Either e a -> IO a liftEither = either throwIO return Greets, Ertugrul -- Not to be or to be and (not to be or to be and (not to be or to be and (not to be or to be and ... that is the list monad.