Proposal: overhaul System.Process

[David Roundy]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 7:54 PM, John Meacham <john at repetae.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 07:45:38PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote:
>  > Finding a good type that encourages the kind of "correctness" approach
>  > to handling errors that we like in Haskell would be good though --
>  > if we can improve safety, cheaply, let's do it!
>
>  It seems more verbose and ambiguous than safe, because now you have to
>  look up the documentation to figure out what the difference between
>  (Left (ExitSuccess,s)) and (Right s) is, taking up precious, precious
>  mindspace to remembering it and introducing another place a bug can be
>  introduced. Code clarity does a lot more for correctness (and
>  debugability) than dubious measures to improve some idea of safety.

Personally, I'd rather have a version that just throws an exception
when the exit code is non-zero.  As Duncan mentioned, this is usually
what you want to do.  Given that the IO monad already has pretty nice
(and flexible) error handling, and that this is only a convenience
function, which is easily implemented in terms of createProcess, it
seems like we should make it actually be convenient.  Using Either for
error handling means that we can't use this for "simple" cases where
the right thing is to fail when the function fails.  Using a tuple as
the output means that for "simple" cases, folks will almost always do
the wrong thing, which is to ignore errors.

David