Re: [Haskell-cafe] better error expression in IO function

At Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:18:14 +1000, Thomas Conway wrote:

On 7/12/07, Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

It's fairly common to use the Either type for this. By convention, "Right" means "correct", and by elimination "Left" means an error...

Presumably, this is because the world is dominated by dull, conventional, right handed people. :-)

Personally, I blame it on the Romans. The English word "sinister" comes from the Latin word "sinister,-tra,-trum", which originally meant "left" but took on meanings of "evil" or "unlucky" by the Classical Latin era[1]. j. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-handed