Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: control-monad-exception 0.5 with monadic call traces
klondike schrieb:
Henning Thielemann escribió:
It seems again to me, that mixing of (programming) errors and exceptions is going on, and I assumed that the purpose of control-monad-exception is to separate them in a better way. You know, could you tell me when using head on an empty list is a programming error and when it is a exception, I have seen both cases...
The case of (head []) is simple: It is a programming error, since the precondition for calling 'head' is that the argument list is non-empty. The caller of 'head' is responsible to check this. If the list comes from user input, then the program part that receives this list from the user is responsible to check for the empty list before calling 'head'. If there is no such check, this is a programming error, and it will not be possible to handle this (like an exception). Before you answer: "What about web servers?", please read on the article I have written recently to sum up the confusion about errors and exceptions: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Error_vs._Exception
Ah, I had been meaning to read your article, so I appreciate you posting the link to it a second time. :-) Out of curiosity, how would you classify an "error" that results from a perfectly fine program, but ill-formed user input, such as when compiling a source file? Cheers, Greg On Dec 7, 2009, at 2:23 AM, Henning Thielemann wrote:
klondike schrieb:
Henning Thielemann escribió:
It seems again to me, that mixing of (programming) errors and exceptions is going on, and I assumed that the purpose of control-monad-exception is to separate them in a better way. You know, could you tell me when using head on an empty list is a programming error and when it is a exception, I have seen both cases...
The case of (head []) is simple: It is a programming error, since the precondition for calling 'head' is that the argument list is non-empty. The caller of 'head' is responsible to check this. If the list comes from user input, then the program part that receives this list from the user is responsible to check for the empty list before calling 'head'. If there is no such check, this is a programming error, and it will not be possible to handle this (like an exception). Before you answer: "What about web servers?", please read on the article I have written recently to sum up the confusion about errors and exceptions:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Error_vs._Exception
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Gregory Crosswhite schrieb:
Ah, I had been meaning to read your article, so I appreciate you posting the link to it a second time. :-)
Out of curiosity, how would you classify an "error" that results from a perfectly fine program, but ill-formed user input, such as when compiling a source file?
I thought I just used this as an example in the article ... ill-formed input is clearly an exception, since it is not the fault of the compiler developer.
participants (2)
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Gregory Crosswhite -
Henning Thielemann