[Haskell-cafe] Re: New Hackage category: Error Handling

[Michael Snoyman]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 9:53 PM, Henning Thielemann <
lemming at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:

>
> On Mon, 7 Dec 2009, Michael Snoyman wrote:
>
>  I actually *did* read your article, and don't know what you are referring
>> to.
>>
>
> If this is true, sorry, I didn't had the impression.
>
> I also think that in an earlier mail I answered, that errors can leave you
> with corrupt data, say invalid file handles, memory pointers, or data
> structures that violate invariants. You won't like to close files from
> invalid file handles and free memory from corrupt pointers or run into
> infinite loops by traversing the corrupt data structures. That's the reason
> why it is better to stop execution of the program and hand over control to
> the next higher level, say the shell or the web browser, that can free
> resources safely.
>

Firstly: I'm really referring exclusively to non-FFI Haskell programs, to
which most of the issues you mention don't really apply. Nonetheless, I
think that for a language with exceptions, it still makes sense to use the
exceptions in these cases.

In all these cases, I think the correct thing is to have a specific
exception type that is thrown that signals that it is such an unrecoverable
error. This allows the programmer to do *whatever* they want. Perhaps they
want to save some other data to a file before exiting? Perhaps they want to
spawn a process to send in a bug report? Who knows. It doesn't matter. The
point is, the user *might* want to do something, and exceptions let them do
it if they wish, or they can completely ignore that specific exception type
and let the program crash anyway.

Michael
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