[Haskell-cafe] Best idiom for avoiding Defaulting warnings with ghc -Wall -Werror ??

[Dave Bayer]

On Jun 22, 2007, at 3:11 PM, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:

> (1) any way to flag a pattern match as "I know this is okay", don't  
> warn about it" without shutting off pattern match warnings completely?

GHC doesn't issue warnings about patterns on the left of =

For example, the following code compiles just fine with ghc -Wall - 
Werror, but the use of "Just m" generates a run-time exception:

> module Main where
>
> a :: [(Int,Int)]
> a = [(2*n,n) | n <- [1..100]]
>
> m :: Int
> Just m = lookup 3 a
>
> main :: IO ()
> main = putStrLn $ show m

I'd take this as a ghc feature, not a bug. When I use this construct  
in practice, I have a proof in mind that the pattern match cannot  
fail for my data, but I can't express the proof in Haskell's type  
system. I'm ok with skipping writing that proof.

The difference here is programmer intent. While a missing pattern  
case can often be an oversight, there's no way to put both cases here  
to the left of =, so the programmer clearly intends this code as  
written.

(An example of a language with a Turing complete type system is Qi:  
http://www.lambdassociates.org/
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it is unreasonable/ 
undecidable to expect a type system to work out arbitrarily difficult  
issues for you automatically. Some work is required, programming in  
the type system. They extend this point of view.)