Sunday, November 12, 2006

Library idea: the Safe library

Often Haskell programmers end up with "error, head []" - a totally useless error message!

Because in developing Catch I have 10,000's of lines, that would be a real pain. To combat this I have:

headNote :: String -> [a] -> a
headNote err [] = error $ "headNote, " ++ err
headNote err (x:xs) = x

I also have fromJustNote, lookupJust (fromJust . lookup), assertNote etc - loads of useful safe functions. I also have headMaybe :: [a] -> Maybe a. Perhaps this could be useful as a library - the safe library?

I would imagine lots of functions from the various Prelude/List libraries, some with Note versions taking a parameter to give a better error message, some with Maybe versions to return a Maybe on failure.

Anyone think this would be useful? Its technically trivial to implement, but I don't have enough time to manage this, so perhaps someone else would like to take this one on?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

can you show me the headNote function in use?

Neil Mitchell said...

I should clarify, headNote still crashes, it just crashes with a more informative error message.

minimum x = foldr min (headNote "minimum" x) (safeTail x)