The Maybe construction is very useful for explicitly handling circumstances where the function cannot produce a sensible answer.
But how far should this notion be taken? When you're writing a function which you realise may not produce what you want, in what circumstances would you use a Maybe, and when would you just throw an error? I'm wondering both in terms of good engineering practise and also for correctness. Should elementary partial functions like > 5 `div` 0 or > head [] return Nothing? I guess it's a bit of a silly suggestion, but it helps to highlight why we use Maybe in the first place. So --- where's the cutoff point in your code? Cheers, D. -- Dougal Stanton _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
