On 24/04/2012 15:19, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
Simon Marlow wrote:
In this thread people are using the term "safe" to mean "total". We already overload "safe" too much, might it be a better idea to use "total" instead?
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I don't see how this thread has anything to do with total vs. partial functions.
My apologies if I've misunderstood, but the problem that people seem to be worried about is fromString failing at runtime (i.e. it is a partial function), and this has been referred to as "unsafe".
I'm saying that the static syntax of string literals should be checked at compile time, not at run time. Isn't that simple enough, and self-evident?
Well, the syntax of overloaded integers isn't checked at compile time, so why should strings be special? I'm not arguing in favour of using OverloadedStrings for URLs or anything like that, but I'm not sure I see why it's bad for Text and ByteString. Cheers, Simon