Proposal: Add readMaybe (and possibly readEither) to Prelude, make Haddocks for read more cautionary

[David Menendez]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 4:38 PM, Artyom <yom at artyom.me> wrote:

> Deprecating `read` is a move in the opposite direction – it makes
> hobbyists' lives harder while not changing anything for professionals
> (because half of them probably uses an in-house or alternative Prelude and
> another half can just grep for calls to `read` during the continuous
> integration build).
>
Do a lot of hobbyists use read? I’m honestly curious: I keep being told
that Read is only useful for parsing the output of Show, but I can’t
imagine that comes up a lot. I guess I could see being useful for
minimal-effort persistence, but parsers with no capacity for error messages
make me uncomfortable.

In any case, I think there are a couple of different conversations here.
The proposal is about adding readMaybe and changing the documentation of
read. People brought up deprecation or removal of read, but I don’t think
those were actually proposed.

-- 
Dave Menendez <dave at zednenem.com>
<http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>
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