[Haskell-cafe] Testing for valid data

When I'm learning a new language I like to translate old programs into the new language as a test of my understanding. However, many of the old programs are from old programming texts, many written in the time of punch-cards for batch processing, and many containing significant amounts of code that only tests for valid data. Should we still be writing programs in this fashion, or acknowledge the fact that better tools for pre-screening data are now available and code only for the problem at hand? Michael