Because of that, calling error in one of your read functions seems a bad idea. In fact, returning an empty list is the right way to return an error in the prelude's parsing framework. If you want something different (e.g., because you want better error messages) you should not be using the prelude's read function.
indeed I use Parsec in this project, because of better error reporting, and because it evaluates more eager. But in this case an external library (Wash) was expecting that I provide a Read instance. I now think I should have overridden the default definition of readList. http://141.57.11.163/cgi-bin/cvsweb/lib/Autolib/Reader/Link.hs?rev=1.2 -- -- Johannes Waldmann, Tel/Fax: (0341) 3076 6479 / 6480 -- ------ http://www.imn.htwk-leipzig.de/~waldmann/ ---------