[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] ANN: random-access-list-0.1

[Jules Bean]

> Whether fail should be in Monad, or whether we really want MonadZero, 
> MonadPlus, MonadError, or something else entirely has been open for 
> discussion, but it is easily shown
> that Maybe is not the most general abstraction - it loses information 
> wrt to (Either String), for instance:
> 
> Prelude> let {f [] = fail "empty"; f [_] = fail "singleton"; f l = 

Yes. But that's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about lookup and index which both have one and exactly one 
failure mode : not found.

For these functions, Maybe a is both the most general and the most 
precise type.

It is trivial to upgrade Maybe a by decorating it with an error should 
you choose to do so:

maybe (throwError "better error message here") return

which I sometimes define as 'withError' or similar.

d <- M.lookup "foo" `withError` "Variable foo not in symbol table"

Jules