[Haskell-cafe] Re: Exception handling in numeric computations

[Ketil Malde]

Jonathan Cast <jonathanccast at fastmail.fm> writes:

>> i.e., that application's file decoding result should be an Either
>> type that anticipates that the file encoding may be invalid.

> This is pretty standard, I thought.  Do people write Haskell file input
> methods that are undefined (`throw exceptions') on invalid inputs (e.g.,
> do people use read to parse input from users or the file system[1])?

I often write parsers that either run successfully, or abort with an
exception.  I could of course return an Either type, but that would
mean the whole file would need to be parsed before any results could
be returned at all - which is a showstopper for streaming processing
of large files.

Since at least my files are typically machine generated, a parse error
is either a programmer error in my parser, a programmer error in the
generating program, or an operator error (viz. the user running the
program on a completely different file type).  In any case, I want the
program execution to halt and report the error as soon as possible.

So the difference between an exception or an error type is mainly what
you intend to do about it.  There's no point in wrapping divisions in
Maybe unless you actually are able to do something useful to recover
from a zero denominator.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants