[Haskell-beginners] comment on this debugging trick?

[Dennis Raddle]

When I design my code, I am aware of the properties I expect my internal
data representations to have, or I want input data to conform to my
expectations. For example, right now I'm writing code that reads MusicXML.
MusicXML is a crazy language, way too complicated for what it does, and the
music typesetters that export MusicXML all do their own idiosyncratic
things with it. I'm only reading the output of one typesetter, Sibelius,
and although I don't know the internals of Sibelius, I can make some
assumptions about what it's going to produce by a few examples, plus my
application doesn't use the full range of MusicXML. I don't need to handle
every case, is what I'm getting at.

However, if I should have been wrong about my assumptions when I wrote the
code, I don't want my program to behave erratically. I want to find out
exactly what went wrong as soon as possible.

Previously, I was including a lot of exception throwing, with each
exception having a unique message describing what had happened, and in
particular describing where in the code it is located so I can find the
problem spot

If I throw generic error messages like "Error: problem parsing" and I have
many of those located in the code, I need the debugger to find it. Same if
I use things like "fromJust" or "head"

I haven't had good experiences using the debugger. Maybe that's my fault,
but I like that I can locate my unique exceptions and that they are
descriptive.

But a month ago I decided this system is pretty ugly. It bloats the code a
lot, and requires writing a lot of messages for situations that will
probably never occur.

I am trying a different method now. I write the code so that surprising
behavior will result in a case or pattern exhaustion, which produces a run
time message with a file name and line number. I'm not sure why ghc gives
the location for a case exhaustion, but not something like "head".

For example, instead of using head xs I can write

x = case xs of {y:_ -> y}

This is a little bloat but not too bad. Most of the time I'm actually
structuring cases and patterns, and it actually helps me to simplify code
to think of how to write it with the fewest cases and so that a case
exhaustion will indicate something pretty specific.

Any comments welcome.
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