[Haskell-cafe] What is the consensus about -fwarn-unused-do-bind ?

Bryan O'Sullivan bos at serpentine.com
Fri Apr 9 12:07:29 EDT 2010


On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <
ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> As of 6.12.1, the new -fwarn-unused-do-bind warning is activated with
> -Wall.  This is based off a bug report by Neil Mitchell:
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3263 .
>
> However, does it make sense for this to be turned on with -Wall?


Personally, I find it to be tremendously noisy and unhelpful, and I always
edit my .cabal files to turn it off. I think of it as a usability
regression.



>  For
> starters, why should this warning apply only to do blocks and not to
> explicit usage of >>, etc.?  That is, the following code (as specified
> in the above bug report) generates an error:
>
>   do doesFileExist "foo"
>      return 1
>
> yet this doesn't:
>
>    doesFileExist "foo" >> return 1
>
> If monadic code is going to return an error, then shouldn't _all_
> monadic code do so, and not just those in do blocks?
>
> Secondly, a fair number of packages seem to be disabling this globally;
> the packages I know of (from mentions on mailing lists and grepping on
> /srv/code/*/*.cabal on code.haskell.org) that have the
> -fno-warn-unused-do-bind option being passed to GHC in their .cabal file
> include:
>
> * HsOpenCL
> * leksah-server
> * xmonad (including xmonad-contrib)
> * xmobar
> * pandoc
>
> My reason for bringing this up is that I'm soon about to release a new
> version of my graphviz library, and am debating what to do.  Note that
> most of these errors are being caused by usage of a monadic-style of
> parsing (before anyone tells me I should be using an Applicative style
> instead, polyparse doesn't support Applicative, so I can't) and as such
> the "return value" is being evaluated anyway.  The way I see it, I have
> 4 options:
>
>  1. Do as the error suggests and preface usage of these parser
>     combinators with "_ <-".
>
>  2. Use some function of type "(Monad m) => m a -> m ()" instead of doing
>     "_ <-".
>
>  3. Duplicate the parser combinators in question so that I have one
>     version that returns a value and another that does the main parser
>     and then returns (); then use this second combinator in do blocks
>     where I don't care about the returned value.
>
>  4. Put "-fno-warn-unused-do-bind" in the .cabal file.
>
> The first two options don't appeal to me as being excessive usage of
> boilerplate; the third involves too much code duplication.  However, I
> am loath to just go and disable a warning globally.
>
> What does the Haskell community think?  Is -fwarn-unused-do-bind a
> worthwhile warning (and code should be updated so as not to cause it to
> find anything to warn about)?  Or is it more of a hindrance to be
> disabled?
>
> --
> Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
> Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
> IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
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>
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