Hello cafe, I have just had a discussion on #haskell about whether it would be useful to have syntactic sugar for exception handling. This and syntactic sugar in general is a very controversial topic, seeing that 'do' notation is used a lot, where applicative/combinator style would be more appropriate. Some people would call this "abuse". Let me tell you why I would like syntactic sugar, first. Haskell is in many regards very beautiful and the layout of code expresses its structure. However, when it comes to exception handling I have two options: use either parentheses or infix operator style. For my taste both get ugly, as soon as you have more than just an action and its small exception handler. At some point you end up using 'let' and/or 'where' to introduce extra names, something which you would want to avoid in general, unless it really adds value to your code. Currently you introduce names just to make the code look nicer. I find this very unfortunate. However, because it is such a controversial topic whether or not to add syntactic sugar for exceptions, I'm proposing an alternative, which seems to be nicer, because it doesn't introduce extra syntax for specific things (like exceptions) and even has the potential to get rid of some keywords (most notably 'if', 'then' and 'else') without making code look worse: layout-style syntactic sugar for function application. Here is an example of what it might look like: function $$ anArgument sin (x^2) anotherArgument f $ x + 3 printf $$ "%s: %s" key values ! key -- Assuming that 'if' is just a function: -- if :: Bool -> a -> a -> a if $$ even x x^2 (x - 1)^2 catch $$ do someOperation someOtherOperation yetAnotherOperation \exception -> putStrLn "Error:" >> print exception bracket $$ openFile "blah" ReadMode \h -> hClose h >> putStrLn "File closed." \h -> do putStrLn "File opened." doSomethingWithHandle h Instead of the symbolic ($$) I could also think of 'with' or 'of' as appropriate keywords, although 'of' would be ambiguous: catch with do someOperation someOtherOperation yetAnotherOperation \exception -> putStrLn "Error:" >> print exception Also you should be able to use do-style semicolons: printf with "%s: %s"; key; values ! key What do you think? I would love to see this '$$' or 'with' construct as a GHC extension. Greets Ertugrul -- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://blog.ertes.de/