Control.Exception

[Jason Dagit]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 6:24 AM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jason Dagit wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 1:19 AM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Johannes Waldmann wrote:
>>>>
>>>> with 6.10, the following does not typecheck:
>>>>
>>>> foo `Control.Exception.catch` \ _ -> return bar
>>>>
>>>> Ambiguous type variable `e' in the constraint:
>>>>     `Control.Exception.Exception e'
>>>>
>>>> It is probably bad programming style anyway but what is the workaround?
>>>
>>> As long as you're aware that it is bad programming style.  We
>>> deliberately
>>> didn't include an easy way to do this, because we want people to think
>>> about
>>> why they need to catch *all* exceptions (most of the time it's a bug).
>>
>> Since the above is bad form, what should I be doing?  Could someone
>> please provide some examples or point me at the list of exceptions
>> that I can catch?  What about catching multiple types of exceptions?
>
> Let's distinguish two kinds of exception handling:

Thanks.  This helps a lot.  Mind if I put it somewhere, such as on the wiki?

> As for the kinds of exception you can catch, nowadays you can catch any type
> that is an instance of Exception.  A good place to start is the list of
> instances of Exception in the docs:
>
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/stable/docs/libraries/base/Control-Exception.html#t%3AException
>
> although that only contains types defined by the base package.
>
> Others have commented on the backwards-compat issues, I don't have anything
> to add there.

Ah, but I had one more question that I don't think anyone has answered
yet.  That is, how to deal with multiple types of exceptions.
Suppose, as a concrete example, that I was looking out for both
ExitCode and PatternMatchFail exceptions.  Maybe I'm being naive, but
it seems like I'm in that situation again where I have to catch all
and then check if fromException succeeds on either PatternMatchFile or
ExitCode types.  And then throw if it both give Nothing?

Thanks!
Jason