On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, Xiao-Yong Jin wrote:
Hi,
I just feel it is not comfortable to deal with exceptions only within IO monad, so I defined
tryArith :: a -> Either ArithException a tryArith = unsafePerformIO . try . evaluate
and it works quite good as
map (tryArith . (div 5)) [2,1,0,5]
evaluates to
[Right 2,Right 5,Left divide by zero,Right 1]
However, I guess unsafePerformIO definitely has a reason for its name. As I read through the document in System.IO.Unsafe, I can't convince myself whether the use of 'tryArith' is indeed safe or unsafe.
Try to never use exception handling for catching programming errors! Division by zero is undefined, thus a programming error when it occurs. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Error http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Exception I'm afraid, a Maybe or Either or Exceptional (see explicit-exception package) return value is the only way to handle exceptional return values properly. Maybe in the larger context of your problem zero denominators can be avoided? Then go this way.