On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
If we start throwing IO exceptions for common and minor occurrences like no readline history available, libraries like this become impossible to write in Haskell. And code that has already been written becomes unusable.
It seems that this discussion has no longer to do with readline but with correct exception handling in Haskell. Did someone follow my links to the Haskell wiki articles Error and Exception? Haskell libraries mix these terms in an unfortunate way. Events like "no history available" are precisely the things that are called "exceptions" (not errors) - situations that cannot be avoided by the programmer but must be handled. An approved method to handle these cases are 'try' constructs. Now if 'bracket' does not work for general MonadIO then it should be generalized.