[Haskell-beginners] programming with Error monad

[Dennis Raddle]

No one replied to this, but I think I figured out why, when I am using the
Error monad, that every statement in a do construct runs at least part way,
whether or not its data is needed. The final output is a Left or Right
value -- and because a Left anywhere can short-circuit the compuation that
follows, there is no way for the program to decide on a final Left/Right
output without running each computation (or at least up to the point where
it's not a Left).

On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 12:59 PM, Dennis Raddle <dennis.raddle at gmail.com>wrote:

> I recently completed a large project and started another one. The first
> project was about processing music, in particular taking MusicXML and/or
> Sibelius files (Sibelius is a music notation program) and producing MIDI
> files according to the specifications I wanted.
>
> The second project is about algorithmic music composition.
>
> To handle errors in the first project, I used "throw" to throw exceptions.
>
> Now I am using the Error monad... actually a combination of ErrorT and
> State. (In the state I hold a random generator for use in algorithms that
> require pseudo-randomness.)
>
> I notice two things now. The first thing is that I can catch and rethrow
> errors to provide annotation about the context. It's like getting a stack
> trace automatically every time there is an error. I realize now this makes
> it easier to debug, and during my first project I spent a lot of time
> debugging that might have been avoidable. (I confess I never could figure
> out the ghci debugger, which might have helped.)
>
> The second thing is that there seems to be less laziness. Every statement
> in a do statement seems to execute even if I don't use result. I think. I
> would have to do some more experiments, but that is what it looks like
> right now. That is another good thing for debugging... less laziness (and
> maybe guaranteed order of execution too?) means it's easier to understand
> what the program is attempting to do.
>
> Does this seem correct?
>
> Dennis
>
>
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