[Haskell-cafe] Re: Are there standard idioms for lazy, pure error handling?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2009-12-07 at 20:31 +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> Somehow I missed this thread. I want to say that I have implemented a general 
> way to add the information of an exception to the "end" of an arbitrary data 
> structure.
> 
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/explicit-exception/0.1.4/doc/html/Control-Monad-Exception-Asynchronous.html
> 
> 
> Duncan already mentioned it:
> 
> > data Exceptional e a = Exceptional {
> >   exception :: Maybe e
> >   result    :: a
> > }
> 
> > However it's pretty clear from the structure of this type that it cannot
> > cope with lazy error handling in sequences. If you try it you'll find
> > you cannot do it without space leaks.
> 
> Actually you spotted the space leak - but how is it pretty clear, that it 
> has the space leak?

Yes you're right, it's not that clear. First time I saw the type my
intuition was that would have a space leak but I had to do some work to
demonstrate it. I was misremembering, it's only clear in retrospect :-)

> I also agree with you, that the possibility to access the result directly, 
> and thus easily ignore the exception is bad. I thought it could be 
> improved by removing the field accessors and instead provide the function:
> 
> switch :: (Maybe e -> c) -> (a -> c) -> Exceptional e a -> c

True.

As a general approach though, I think I rather like just making up extra
algebraic types and handling them with their natural folds and unfolds.
It's very much in the pure lazy FP tradition.

Duncan