Proposal: die to System.Exit (and/or Prelude)
Simon Hengel
sol at typeful.net
Sat Dec 14 10:56:11 UTC 2013
Hi!
I propose to add
die :: String -> IO ()
die err = hPutStrLn stderr err >> exitFailure
to System.Exit.
Reasoning:
(1) It's a frequently required functionality. Almost every command-line
program has code similar to this.
(2) The definition is relatively short, but in addition to the
definition, you need two import statements.
(3) It's frequently done wrong (e.g. writing to stdout instead of
stderr, or not using exitFailure, or both).
I haven't done any extensive research on Hackage, but I quickly looked
at Haddock. Here we have a definition of die [1], but we also print to
stdout at a couple of place and then call exitFailure [2].
Personally, I think it should be re-exported from Prelude. But this may
be controversial. So let's have two separate votes:
Add System.Exit.die: +1
Re-export it from Prelude: +1
(discussion until December, 28th)
Cheers,
Simon
[1] https://github.com/ghc/haddock/blob/8d4c94ca5a969a5ebbb791939fb0195dc672429e/src/Haddock/Utils.hs#L303
[2] https://github.com/ghc/haddock/blob/c6faeae064668125721b0d5e60f067f90c538933/src/Haddock.hs#L87
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