Great points.
I often run into situations where sketching out non-terminating endpoints
leads to a precise domain, but after peer review it becomes clear that a
much simpler program would result from compromising with a less precise
domain that eliminates these points altogether.
Eliminating branching on constructors in Haskell is a common aspect of this
refinement, it's true.
Cheers,
Darren
On Nov 1, 2015 03:18, wrote:
The ability to express non-termination is a feature, not a bug. If the
program truly cannot produce a useful result for some input, it should
crash, the earlier the better. Wrapping the return value ONLY to make a
non-total program *appear* total is kind of ugly (and commits you to a
potentially inappropriate/nonsensical model for the problem at hand). It
is cleaner to either constrain the input to values you're prepared to
deal with or crash when the implicit invariant is violated.
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