[Haskell-cafe] exceptions vs. Either

[Ketil Malde]

Graham Klyne <GK at ninebynine.org> writes:

> 2. I like to distinguish between "expected errors" and "unexpected
> errors".  Having been burned in the past by using exceptions (not FP),
> I try to use them only for conditions that are truly unexpected;
> i.e. _exceptional_.  Bad input, IMO, is something that is not
> unexpected, so I don't really like to handle that via exceptions.

I agree, trying to handle exceptions caused by incorrect input is just
needless complication, the program should crash, and the calling
function should be fixed instead. 

Common errors that happen to me are:

       Prelude.head : empty list
       Prelude.read : no parse
and    Prelude.(!!) : index too large
and so on.
   
Is there any easy way (TH?) to amend these to output the line number
of the offending caller?  It would be a great improvement to see
something like

        Prelude.head : empty list in Foo.hs, line 4711

since programs generally contain many, many calls to functions like
these.  

-kzm 
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants