[Haskell-cafe] Error Monad and strings

[Dietrich Epp]

I'll say yes, a pattern match failure is a bug.  This is one of the  
great debates in the language: whether all pattern matching code  
should be guaranteed complete at compile time or not.  However, any  
function you call which returns a result in your monad could  
theoretically call "fail" if it was written that way.  Data.Map.lookup  
used to call "fail" when it could not find a key, but that got changed.

If you don't want to catch these errors in your monad, you can write  
your own monad (or monad transformer).  For example:

newtype ErrorCode = ErrorCode Int deriving Show
newtype ErrorCodeT m a = ErrorCodeT { runErrorCodeT :: m (Either  
ErrorCode a) }
instance Monad m => Monad (ErrorCodeT m) where
     return = ErrorCodeT . return . Right
     a >>= b = ErrorCodeT $ do
         m <- runErrorCodeT a
         case m of
             Left err -> return $ Left err
             Right x -> runErrorCodeT $ b x
     fail = ErrorCodeT . fail
failWithCode :: Monad m => Int -> ErrorCodeT m a
failWithCode = ErrorCodeT . return . Left . ErrorCode

There's probabaly a library somewhere which does this already.

On 2010 July 27, at 16:08, Gerald Gutierrez wrote:

> I see. So strings must be supported in the case of a bug which  
> cannot be caught at compile time? In other words, if I get an error  
> with a string, I'm pretty much guaranteed it is a bug, i.e. a  
> pattern match error as the "fail" documentation says.