[Haskell-cafe] Text.Regex.Base throws exceptions with makeRegexOptsM

[Omari Norman]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 01:24:02AM +0100, Daniel Fischer wrote:
> For Either, there used to be
> 
> instance Error e => Monad (Either e) where
>     ...
>     fail s = Left (strMsg s)
> 
> in mtl's Control.Monad.error, and all was fine if one used the regex 
> functions with e.g. (Either String) as the Monad.
> 
> Recently, however, it was decided to have
> 
> instance Monad (Either e) where
>     ...
>     fail s = error s -- not explicitly, but by Monad's default method
> 
> in Control.Monad.Instances. So now, if you have a pattern-match failure 
> using (Either String), you don't get a nice 'Left message' but an error.

Thanks so much, I would never have figured all this out. Spent a lot of
time tonight rummaging through mtl and transformers and
Control.Monad.Instances.

> Now, what can you do to get the equivalent of the old (Either String)?
> 
> Use 'ErrorT String Identity'.

This I tried. It turned out that it didn't work though and I had the
same problem. I am guessing it is because my module has some imports at
the top that are bringing the instances in Control.Monad.Instances into
scope. Then it seems the Monad instance in Control.Monad.Instances
(which is using the default "fail", which calls "error") is being used,
rather than the instance from Control.Monad.Trans.Error. Only now do I
really understand why orphan instances are bad:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Orphan_instance

A simple fix for it all was to wrap Either in a newtype and then define
a Monad instance for the newtype. --Omari