[Haskell-cafe] Use unsafePerformIO to catch Exception?

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Lennart Augustsson <lennart at augustsson.net>:

> Some examples of what might happen:

OK, these are interesting phenomena.  From a practical point of view,
though, I could see someone weighing the potential costs and benefits
of a exception handler outside IO like this, and these effects might
not even carry all that much weight.  Does that make sense, or is the
problem really more dire than I understand?

I mean, it isn't the first time I've seen this explained in terms of
predictability in a case where there are two possible exceptions, so
I have to take for granted that this is a compelling argument to some,
but it is evidently a matter of perspective.

	Donn

> If you have more than one possible exception in your code, you don't
> know which one you will get.
> It can vary between compilers, optimization levels, program runs, or
> even evaluating the same expression within one program.
>
> If you have code that have both an infinite loop and an exception you
> don't know if you'll get the loop or the exception.
>
> Breaking the deterministic behaviour can lead to strange consequences,
> because the compiler relies on it.
> For instance, the following code
>    let x = someExpression
>    print x
>    print x
> could print different values for x the two times you print it.
> (This is somewhat unlikely, but could happen when evaluating in
> parallel with ghc, because there is a small window where two threads
> might start evaluating x and later update x with two different
> values.)
>
>   -- Lennart