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

On Jul 11, 2007, at 20:10 , Jeremy Shaw wrote:

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

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On 7/12/07, Andrew Coppin wrote:

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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].

Dig deeper; it far predates the Romans. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH