[Haskell-cafe] Ensuring all values of an ADT are explicitly handled OR finding all occurrences of type X in my app

[David Turner]

I've done exactly this a number of times. The approach I generally take is
to define a completely new ADT, mark the old one as deprecated, and then
simply plough through the compiler warnings and errors, which is a mostly
mechanical process.

On occasion I've written a (temporary) injection from the old datatype into
the new one which lets you make the changes piecemeal (by topologically
sorting the usages) which is nice as if there's any risk of making a
mistake then tools like `git bisect` can help you find the slip in the sea
of otherwise identical changes. Doesn't always work smoothly but it's often
ok.

This also has the advantage that you don't have to fix all the usages in
third-party code or dependent libraries straight away. The deprecation step
need not be immediate, depending on how stable your API is supposed to be.

Cheers,

David

On 31 Jan 2017 06:48, "Saurabh Nanda" <saurabhnanda at gmail.com> wrote:

> Btw, what about the other approach -- listing all possible occurrences of
> type X throughout the app?
>
> -- Saurabh.
>
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 12:15 PM, Saurabh Nanda <saurabhnanda at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> We want this at my company too, so we don't write fall-through cases.
>>>
>>
>> That's a short-term workaround, yes. However it doesn't fit into
>> Haskell's overall story of language-enforced correctness.
>>
>> -- Saurabh.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> http://www.saurabhnanda.com
>
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