Magicloud Magiclouds
Read often throws runtime errors, which breaks the robust of the problem. How to deal with it? Without lost too much proformance (so reads is a no). At least, if its error could be catched, that'd be better.
You might like to try using a real parser instead of read. For instance, the polyparse package provides module Text.Parse which provides parser analogues for all of the Prelude instances of Read. It provides nice-ish error messages, or in the lazy variation, catchable exceptions. It also gives you a nice framework to write your own instances. The DrIFT tool can automatically derive these instances for your own datatypes, if you don't want to do it by hand. (I expect it is easy to teach the 'derive' tool to do it too.) Regards, Malcolm