I don’t think we should change semantics of hd/1 as it comes from Erlang and
can be used in guards.
Fortunately we have `List.first([])` and `Enum.drop([], 1)` as “safe"
replacements.
> On 12 Dec 2023, at 13:19, waiting-for-dev <cram1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Kernel.hd/1 and Kernel.tl/1 raise an ArgumentError when given an empty list
> ([]). In my humble opinion, it would be beneficial to have safe versions of
> these functions, ideally following Elixir's naming convention: hd! and tl!
> for the raising variants, and hd and tl for the safe ones returning {:ok,
> term} or {:error, :empty_list}. I understand that this may not be a problem
> for writing expressive code, as we can always pattern match on lists instead
> of using these two functions. However, I believe it could be a potential
> issue for newcomers. Of course, the elephant in the room here is backward
> compatibility, but perhaps that could be considered for a major release?
>
> For what it's worth, the same issue exists in the Haskell ecosystem, where
> the head and tail functions defined in the Prelude also raise errors on empty
> lists. This has been a persistent annoyance for the community, and many
> alternative Preludes ship with functions returning Maybe a values to address
> this. While the official Prelude in Haskell has never changed for backward
> compatibility reasons, in Haskell, you have the option to not import it, but
> that's not an option in Elixir.
>
> Any ideas? I'm happy to hear everyone's thoughts on this. Thanks in advance
> for your feedback.
>
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