Hi

On 12 Sep 2007, at 11:44, ChrisK wrote:

Conor McBride wrote:
I'd like operations to complain
about bogus input, rather than producing bogus output.


Then you want a runtime assertion checking error helpful Data.List replacement.

Could you use Control.Exception.assert and make a wrapper for Data.List?

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/sec- assertions.html

Hmmm. It might be quite annoying to make it a wrapper if it's just a question of appealing to error rather than returning dummy values in failure cases. Defining the domain of a function can be quite like defining the function itself. Also, sometimes there can be problems arriving at a Bool. For example,
zipping colists is a productive coprogram, and it can raise errors in
off-diagonal cases, but you can't compute in advance whether you're on the
diagonal.

A more serious point is that in some cases we might want take to
underapproximate, or zip to truncate (or tail [] = [] ?). I don't think there's always a clear "library" choice here. I tend to be pragmatic about it. I was
just pointing out that it does sometimes make sense to use less defined
functions when one has a more specific domain in mind. I'm usually happy to
write the fussy variants myself, if I'm that agitated.

Funny old world

Conor

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