Proposal: System.Environment.getEnv should return Maybe

[Evan Laforge]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:51 PM, John Meacham <john at repetae.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's awkward and surprising how getEnv throws an exception when an env
>> var is not set, since it's very common for env vars to be optional,
>> and it's not convenient to catch exceptions in haskell (I have to look
>> up Control.Exception every time, and then add LANGUAGE
>
> For true IO exceptions, you should be using the Prelude.catch mechanism.
> It's the right thing to do and makes your program more portable as a bonus.
> It is quite unfortunate that IO exceptions became conflated with imprecise
> and dynamic exceptions and clash in their names. They really are different
> beasts alltogether.

Good point, I had forgotten about the Prelude catch.  I think I can go
remove a bunch of ScopedTypedVariables now.

The ghc exception situation is a bit messy, and I never have all the
distinctions quite memorized, but it's also because I hardly ever have
to deal with exceptions (of the "magical return value" variety, I use
Either and Maybe all the time), unlike certain other languages.  And
that's a very good thing!

If I forget the rest about exceptions due to lack of use, I should at
least remember that IO exceptions are different from, and better
behaved than, the imprecise ones.