Abstract

Using a language without exception handling is like driving a car with no brakes and no seatbelt --- things work fine until something goes wrong. You also learn to drive rather carefully. This paper describes an exception handling extension to the Haskell lazy functional language. The implementation turned out to be very easy but we had problems finding a viable semantics for our system. The resulting semantics is a compromise between theoretical beauty and practical utility. 1 Introduction Haskell is an ivory tower language: full of lofty ideas, built on solid semantic foundations, praised by grey-bearded professors and about as much use in the real world as a chocolate teapot. For Haskell to emerge from the ivory tower, it must be possible to write the kinds of programs that less idealistic programmers can write in C, Java, Ada and other useful languages: programs that interact with the real world in interesting ways (using graphics, GUIs, databases, etc) and which are robust enough...

Citations