[Haskell-cafe] better error expression in IO function

Jeremy Shaw jeremy.shaw at linspireinc.com
Wed Jul 11 20:10:24 EDT 2007


At Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:18:14 +1000,
Thomas Conway wrote:
> 
> On 7/12/07, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> > It's fairly common to use the Either type for this. By convention,
> > "Right" means "correct", and by elimination "Left" means an error...
> 
> Presumably, this is because the world is dominated by dull,
> conventional, right handed people. :-)

Personally, I blame it on the Romans. 

  The English word "sinister" comes from the Latin word
  "sinister,-tra,-trum", which originally meant "left" but took on
  meanings of "evil" or "unlucky" by the Classical Latin era[1].

j.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-handed


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