[Haskell-cafe] Bool is not...safe?!

Olaf Klinke olf at aatal-apotheke.de
Sat Jul 7 20:01:25 UTC 2018


>But in Prolog every piece of code is evaluated to TRUTH or to FALSE. Each sentence is a goal which can be achieved and becomes a fact >or can not be – and becomes lie. So, if you inverse semantic in Haskell – program is compiled although with strange behaviour but in >Prolog program become lie. Prolog evaluation model has clean definition in run-time too, not only at compile-time. Execution of >Prolog program is a CHECK: is it truth or lie? 

I have only very limited Prolog pratice. But what you state about Prolog's semantics is only true for very simple cases, isn't it? As soon as I/O is involved, things get messier. Also, there are actually three outcomes as far as I know: provably true, provably false and "could not be proved" which is different from "false". 

When I anticipate an exception in an application where the condition prohibits the program from fulfilling its purpose, I simply call error. A common pattern I use is a library function that has return type (Either SomeErr Value), and the application takes it and wraps the result in either (error.show) return, transforming (Either SomeErr Value) into (IO Value). For libraries, one should be more careful, as we don't know what kind of environment the function might be called in - see Joachim Durchholz's post. 

Olaf


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