[Haskell-cafe] MonadError vs Control.Exception

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 6/05/2012, at 8:09 AM, Albert Y. C. Lai wrote:
> Exceptions appeared as early as in ML and Ada in the 1980s,

Oh they go back long before that.  PL/I had them in the 1960s
(manual 1965, compiler 1966) and Burroughs Extended Algol for
the B6700 had them in the 1970s (maybe already in 1969 when
the B6500 was released).  CLU had them in the late 70s.
The exception handling in CLU paper is 1979 and says
"In referring to the condition as exceptions rather than errors
 we are following Goodenough.  The term "exception" is chosen
 because, unlike the term "error," it does not imply that
 anything is wrong;"

The 'jumpout' function in Pop2 was basically an early adoption
of the idea of continuations via Landin's "J-functions"; it was
used as an exception handling mechanism and that was in the
early 70s.

> Exceptions first appeared under another name in the paper of David Parnas and Harald Würges "response to undesired events in software systems" in ICSE 1976.

Since several programming languages offered exception handling
of one sort or another well before that, that *cannot* be the
first appearance of exceptions.