[Haskell-cafe] exceptions vs. Either

[Bjoern Knafla]

Hi - I am just learning Haskell and am far away from exception handling 
intricacies. However I just recently read an article of Herb Sutter 
about exception handling in C++ with some rules when to use exception 
handling - and perhaps these rules might be applicable to Haskell too 
(article: "When and How to Use Exceptions", Herb Sutter, C/C++ Users 
Journal August 2004, pp. 47 -- 51)?

Herb Sutter gave these rules :

An error is any failure that prevents a function from succeeding. Three 
main kind of errors:
- a condition that prevents the function from meeting a precondition of 
another function that must be called (so to say: the caller has to 
check for preconditions while the function called my use C/C++ asserts 
to assert the correctness of its preconditions)

- a condition that prevents a function from establishing one of its own 
postconditions (e.g. producing a (valid) return value)

- a condition that prevents the function from reestablishing an 
invariant that it is responsible to maintain (special kind of 
postcondition mainly found in object oriented code).



Any other condition is not an error and shouldn't be reported as one.

The code that could cause an error is responsible for detecting and 
reporting the error otherwise this is a programming mistake.




I am not sure if these rules apply to real functional programming but 
at least they seem to be useable. The point that the caller is 
responsible for checking the preconditions of functions it is calling 
is something I also found as a suggestion in using the object oriented 
language Eiffel.


Cheers and best regards
Bjoern