[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell-beginners] Just how unsafe is unsafe

[Kalman Noel]

As I didn't catch the whole thread, I hope I'm not just repeating
everyone else:

Roel van Dijk wrote:

> I guess what unsafe should mean is a matter of taste. Personally I
> find correctness more important that pureness. An unsafe function will
> crash your program if evaluated when its preconditions do not hold.
> Whether that is because of impurity (segmentation fault?), a partial
> pattern match or a direct error "bla" is not that important. It might
> be important when determining why your program crashed, but the result
> is still the same.

Maybe for the purposes of naming functions it's sufficient to argument
that a crash is a crash whatsoever, but as for terminology in general, I
think it's good to distinguish (1) partial functions from (2) functions
that break purity, may lead to segmentation faults etc.  I suppose (2)
is the »traditional« meaning of unsafe.

The motivation for this distinction is that you can still reason to some
extent about (1) if you consider _|_, and that there are many functions
that, although useful and correct, aren't guaranteed to terminate on
infinite input, thus are partial.  On the other hand, functions from (2)
should always be called unsafeFoo, and/or wrapped by safe functions.

Kalman