[Haskell-cafe] Re: Laziness and Either

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 01:12:16PM +0200, apfelmus wrote:
> I think that using  [Maybe a]  for this purpose is too fine-grained, I 
> would use a custom list type
> 
>   data River a = a :< (River a) | Done | Error
> 
> (I didn't want to call it  Stream  because that name is too overloaded 
> already and  PartialList  is too long :) The three constructors 
> correspond to the three cases you mention. In particular, Error takes 
> the role of the last  Nothing .

That sounds like a good idea.  But I'd call it Creek, because a river is
present year-round, while a creek sometimes dries up in the summer.  :) And
I'd also vote for adding a String (or more generic parameter) to the Error
type, so you can give some sort of reporting when something goes wrong.
String is appealing, because then you could make Creek a monad, and fail
could generate a nice Error message (assuming fail = Error).

Of course, you could take the silly metaphor even further

data Creek a = a :< (Creek a) | Ocean | Drought String

:)
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University