[Haskell-cafe] Re: Debugging partial functions by the rules

John Hughes rjmh at cs.chalmers.se
Wed Nov 15 15:53:03 EST 2006


> From: Robert Dockins <robdockins at fastmail.fm>

> It seems to me that every possible use of a partial function has some  
> (possibly imagined) program invariant that prevents it from failing.   
> Otherwise it is downright wrong.  'head', 'fromJust' and friends  
> don't do anything to put that invariant in the program text.

Well, not really. For example, I often write programs with command line arguments, that contain code of the form

    do ...
       [a,b] <- getArgs
       ...

Of course the pattern match is partial, but if it fails, then the standard error message is good enough.

This applies to "throw away" code, of course, and if I decide to keep the code then I sooner or later extend it to fix the partiality and give a more sensible error message. But it's still an advantage to be ABLE to write the more concise, but cruder version initially.

This isn't a trivial point. We know that error handling code is a major part of software cost--it can even dominate the cost of the "correct case" code (by a large factor). Erlang's "program for the correct case" strategy, coupled with good fault tolerance mechanisms, is one reason for its commercial success--the cost of including error handling code *everywhere* is avoided. But this means accepting that code *may* very well fail--the failure is just going to be handled somewhere else.

Haskell (or at least GHC) has good exception handling mechanisms too. We should be prepared to use them, and "let it fail" when things go wrong. The savings of doing so are too large to ignore.

John 

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