Re: [Haskell-cafe] Doubting Haskell

On 16 Feb 2008, at 11:46 PM, Anton van Straaten wrote:

Colin Paul Adams wrote:

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> "Cale" == Cale Gibbard writes: Cale> So, the first version: Cale> import System.IO import Control.Exception (try) Cale> main = do mfh <- try (openFile "myFile" ReadMode) case mfh Cale> of Left err -> do putStr "Error opening file for reading: " Cale> print err Right fh -> do mline <- try (hGetLine fh) case Cale> mline of Left err -> do putStr "Error reading line: " print Cale> err hClose fh Right line -> putStrLn ("Read: " ++ line) Left? Right? Hardly descriptive terms. Sounds like a sinister language to me.

I was thinking along the same lines. Politically-sensitive left- handed people everywhere ought to be offended that "Left" is the alternative used to represent errors, mnemonic value notwithstanding.

Is there a benefit to reusing a generic Either type for this sort of thing?

Standardization. It's already a standard, we need a standard sum type anyway, and it'd be kind of silly to have two isomorphic types with the same signature in the Prelude. jcc