[Haskell-cafe] Decorating exceptions with backtrace information

[Henning Thielemann]

There seem to be multiple beginnings of the discussion. What is currently 
discussed?

If someone says "exceptions" and "backtrace" in one sentence, I suspect 
like many times before, that again confusion of the concepts of exceptions 
and errors is ahead. Errors already support call stacks. Why should 
exceptions get them, too? Exceptions should carry information that is 
useful for a user, but a callstack is not useful for a user.

I can imagine that it would be helpful for the user to get a stacked 
exception information like:
    Parse error on line 42, column 23
    while reading file "foo/bar"
    while traversing directory "blabla"

But since you refer to the CallStack feature of GHC, this seems not to be 
addressed in the proposals.



On Fri, 8 May 2020, Carter Schonwald wrote:

> I have no doubt such a mechanism would have saved me many hours of 
> debugging exceptions in Haskell systems I've worked on in the past.

If you must debug exceptions, then this sounds like exceptions were abused 
for programming errors.



Ben writes in:
    http://www.well-typed.com/blog/2020/04/dwarf-3/

"Unfortunately, the untyped nature of Haskell exceptions complicates the 
migration path for existing code."

Actually, it only proves again, that it was wrong from the beginning to 
hide information about potential exceptions in the IO monad instead of 
making them explicit via ExceptionalT, ExceptT or the like.