[Haskell-cafe] How to debug GHC

[Ketil Malde]

"Claus Reinke" <claus.reinke at talk21.com> writes:

> no direct answer to your question, but a general comment on the
> original problem (speaking from bad experience;-): things like
> "head" have no place in a Haskell program of any non-trivial size,
> because of their useless error messages.

I must say I liked John Meacham's description of his "magic
underscore".  My solution to this problem is redefining the
troublesome functions as cpp macros, e.g: 

  #define BUG(C_,M_) (error ("Program error - '"++C_++"' failed: "++M_++". Location: '"++__FILE__++"' line "++show __LINE__))
  #define head (\xs -> case xs of { (x:_) -> x ; _ -> BUG("head","empty list")})

Ideally, I think something like this should be the default behavior
for these functions. 

-kzm

PS: If anybody wants, I can mail my additional cpp definitions for 'head',
'at' (array indexing, I couldn't work out how to redefine the bang),
'read' and 'fromJust'.
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants