[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Propeganda

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2008 Aug 24, at 7:16, C.M.Brown wrote:
> OK, so you're basically saying that segfaults can be eliminated with a
> strong type system, whereas pattern matching errors is the result of  
> some

Not really, no.  A sufficiently strong type system will eliminate  
segfaults (modulo bugs in the language runtime or erroneous use of the  
FFI); but Haskell arguably doesn't have a sufficiently strong type  
system:  pattern match errors being the symptom, and the resolution is  
dependent types.

That said, what I was really saying was that a pattern match error  
still gives you more information, and more easily, than a segfault:   
if it's not something trivial like dereferencing a null pointer, the  
segfault may well be in completely unrelated code because the  
erroneous operation (for example) overran a buffer and corrupted  
unrelated data.  Whereas with laziness, you may have to do some  
footwork to find the actual error (ghci's debugger helps, as does hpc  
as someone else mentioned upthread) but it's deterministic.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH