exceptions and stacks

6 Nov 2012


      Hello,

     I'm getting really frustrated by error handling in haskell. By this 
I mean "assert"-like errors. Which means, something that should never 
happen, happens. This will happen in the development and deployment of 
software of any size.
     When coding the feature you'll say, I don't need to handle the 
"Nothing" case, because it will never happen, or almost never, and this 
is not critical production software.

     But if one day it happens you find yourself with a several thousand 
lines program and all you have to debug is the input data (most of the 
time anyway, sometimes not even that) and this error message (for instance):

*** Exception: Prelude.head: empty list

     And you don't know even, did you call "head" or maybe a library you 
are using called it.

     This is really poor compared to what Java, python and others 
offers. I can understand that it's difficult to provide a stack trace, 
especially with lazy evaluation, but at least the function name and 
maybe a line number... Actually I don't know why it would be so 
difficult to also give me the values of the parameters of the 
function... using print and if it's a pure function it intuitively 
doesn't seem difficult.

     I've tried ghci with :trace and ":set -fbreak-on-exception" and I 
got nowhere. It breaks in things which are not important (I have no idea 
where it breaks, it claims an exception was thrown, maybe but not in my 
code and it never reaches my code for sure). After hitting ":continue" 
many times, I get to my exception and there I didn't manage to get 
useful information (:hist never printed me anything).

     But I would like not to have to use ghci at all. And to avoid 
having to write all over the place in my code these "else" and case 
situations for things I assume are impossible (these are cases I would 
not write in other modern languages).

     This is a feature for which I would be ready to pay a 50% speed 
penalty and 50% memory use penalty.

     I understand if it's the haskell way of writing all those else 
clauses... But I think in that case it really makes it compare 
negatively to other languages. It would be a real minus in my opinion 
(including to code readability).

     I have read (quickly) those but didn't find the solution there:
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/ghci-debugger.html
http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/error-handling.html

     Any advice will be welcome! I really hope I missed something.

Emmanuel

Emmanuel Touzery

Ozgur Akgun

Ozgur Akgun

Emmanuel Touzery

Emmanuel Touzery

Emmanuel Touzery

Emmanuel Touzery

Amy de Buitléir

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