Adding binary to the Haskell Platform

[Alexander Dunlap]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Don Stewart<dons at galois.com> wrote:
> alexander.dunlap:
>> To add to the laundry list of problems with Data.Binary, I don't like
>> the fact that decode calls error on invalid input. I can't think of
>> any great alternatives (using Maybe as the result type would be too
>> strict, of course, and returning partial results would be difficult
>> with polymorphism), but it seems a bit unclean that decode has to be
>> used with the IO monad to catch the errors. (Of course, the only
>> reason you would have bad input would be if you were using the IO
>> monad, so the practical implications are not great, but still, it
>> would be nice if there was a better way.)
>
> That's right. Originally, it used a custom Either type, but it isn't
> possible to stream decoders that way.
>
> I'd consider it an intentional design feature.
>
> -- Don
>

OK. Would it be worth creating an extensible exception (something like
BinaryDecodeError) for this then, instead of using the call to error?
That would at least make it less error-prone to catch.

Alex