[Haskell-cafe] Debugging methods for haskell

[Magnus Therning]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:13 PM, Don Stewart<dons at galois.com> wrote:
> fernanbolando:
>> Hi all
>>
>> I recently used 2 hours of work looking for a bug that was causing
>>
>> Program error: Prelude.!!: index too large
>>
>> This is not very informative. It did not give me a hint which function
>> was causing this. In C adding a few printf would have helped me, but
>> in haskell I was not sure how to do that. Can anybody point me to some
>> debuggin method everyone uses.
>
> You could:
>
>    * use Debug.Trace.trace  (equivalent of printf debugging)
>    * use asserts: the 'assert' function
>    * use the GHCi debugger to construct a stack trace
>    * use profiling to construct a stack trace.
>    * use the GHC head branch for first class stack traces, described
>          in, "Finding the needle: Stack Traces for GHC"
>                http://pubs.doc.ic.ac.uk/finding-the-needle/finding-the-needle.pdf

Another option would be to use Safe.atMay[1] instead of !!.

[1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/safe/0.2/doc/html/Safe.html#v%3Aat

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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