On Fri, 24 Feb 2012, Conrad Parker wrote:
This irritates me too; I don't think that Haskell exceptions should be
used for much of anything, exceptional condition or not.
+1 to the general concept of not using Haskell exceptions in library code.
This depends on what you call "exception". The exception handling part of the IO monad? The general concept of an exceptional situation? I think if you request the value of a variable, but that variable turns out to not exist, then the question was not valid and that is somehow an exceptional situation.
Is looking up a missing key in a Map an exception? That is exactly this case ("variable" is really only an appropriate term from the standpoint of the shell, which [sometimes inappropriately] conflates the environment with its own variables). Or are you arguing that that also should be an exception?