Re: Proposal: Add readMaybe (and possibly readEither) to Prelude, make Haddocks for read more cautionary

Am 04.01.2017 um 04:59 schrieb David Menendez:

On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 4:38 PM, Artyom wrote:

...

Deprecating `read` is a move in the opposite direction – it makes hobbyists' lives harder while not changing anything for professionals (because half of them probably uses an in-house or alternative Prelude and another half can just grep for calls to `read` during the continuous integration build).

Do a lot of hobbyists use read? I’m honestly curious: I keep being told that Read is only useful for parsing the output of Show, but I can’t imagine that comes up a lot. I guess I could see being useful for minimal-effort persistence, but parsers with no capacity for error messages make me uncomfortable.

I use it for numbers, mostly, typically command line arguments. Parsing number is not trivial for floats (or decmal/hex/octal/etc). Cheers Ben