[Haskell-cafe] Re: Is "take" behaving correctly?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, PR Stanley wrote:

> I quite like the argument that take is a total function and as such all its 
> return values are from teh specificed range. I can also see the logic in
> take n [] = [] where n > 0
> taking n from nothing, or the empty set, returns nothing!
> The same should apply to head and tail. head or tail  of [] should be [].

Today you can use (drop 1) which has this property. However I consider it 
bad style that 'tail' and 'drop' behave so differently, and that one has 
to write (drop 1) when in fact (tailSafe) is meant. People reading (drop 
1) in a program may assume, that the programmer was a newbie, who was not 
aware of 'tail'.