[Haskell-cafe] Error Monad and strings

[Antoine Latter]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Dietrich Epp <depp at zdome.net> wrote:
> 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.

I've always thought that being able to write:

> catMaybes :: [Maybe a] -> [a]
> catMaybes xs = [ x | Just x <- xs ]

is really cool, which relies on:

> fail _ = []

being in the Monad instance for List.

But I would give that up for getting "fail" out of Monad. We can alway
re-implement "catMaybes."

Antoine