blackholes and exception handling

[Felipe Lessa]

On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 01:10:17PM +0200, Sebastian Fischer wrote:
> What makes me wary is that GHC distinguishes between different kinds
> of non-terminating computations (those it can detect as black holes
> and those it can't). As a consequence, the semantics of my program
> depends on how I define the infinite loop don't_launch_first (the
> program either writes to stdout or doesn't).
>
> For me, it is interesting to notice (and slightly disturbing) that
> this is intended and that the Control.Exception module defines the
> NonTermination exception to explicitly handle black holes.

If you think about it, there aren't a lot of options:

 (a) Don't provide a way of catching *any* kind of
 non-terminating computations.

 (b) Provide a way to catch some of them.

 (c) Solve the halting problem and catch'em all. =)

Considering that someone who wants (a) can live with (b) or (c)
just by ignoring the extra functionality, and that (c) is
impossible, GHC provides (b).

Cheers,

--
Felipe.