Why not? I don't think mentioning that length doesn't work with infinite lists will do any harm.

I think many people make a distinction between partiality due to endless evaluation and partiality due to a call to "error". But I still think documenting either of both things can be helpful.

Best,
Daniel

Am Fr., 31. Aug. 2018 um 04:09 Uhr schrieb David Feuer <david.feuer@gmail.com>:
Yes, I think so. What about functions like length? length (repeat ()) is bottom. repeat () is not bottom. Ergo, length is partial. But I don't think we want to say that!

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 10:05 PM Daniel Díaz Casanueva <dhelta.diaz@gmail.com> wrote:
+1 from me too. The partiality of a function seems to me like something that should be documented.

Best,
Daniel

Am Fr., 31. Aug. 2018 um 02:10 Uhr schrieb Richard Eisenberg <rae@cs.brynmawr.edu>:
Proposal: Mark partial functions in `base` as partial

Motivation: I'm about to teach Haskell to a classful of beginners. In my experience, they will soon reach for functions like `head` and `tail`, because pattern-matching is foreign to them. I would love just to be able to say "Don't use partial functions", but many students will not easily be able to tell partial functions from total ones.

I do expect this problem to work itself out rather quickly, and then students will be able to identify partial functions, but loudly marking partial functions as partial seems like a small service to everyone and a bigger one to newbies. I don't see any downsides.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Richard
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