### begriffs

Day 2. To be honest, today I tried basic stuff like implementing fizzbuzz in Haskell. I’ll probably learn most by writing as many actual programs as I can. I’m sure all this typesystem stuff will fade into the background as I concentrate on writing useful things.

However, who really wants to read a blog post showing a fizzbuzz implementation? I’m guessing you want something more thought-provoking as you wait for my basic language skills to get a little stronger.

So here’s one observation: I was reading about lists in Learn You a Haskell and I came across this example

h> head []
*** Exception: Prelude.head: empty list

This is an example of one of the partial functions defined in the standard library. It’s called partial because it cannot handle all the values in its domain.

h> :t head
h> :t []
[] :: [a]

GHCI reports that the empty list is indeed in the domain of head (namely, lists). Unlike Ruby or Clojure, Haskell does not commit Tony Hoare’s “billion dollar mistake” of allowing null values so there’s no option when taking the head of an empty list but to throw an exception.

The Haskell docs suggest avoiding partial functions altogether. The language provides alternative constructions. Let’s look at one. Rather than test for an empty list and conditionally take its head, the docs suggest we use a case statement.

-- replace this
if null xs
then g
else h (head xs) (tail xs)

-- with this
case xs of
[] -> g
y:ys -> h y ys

Only this doesn’t entirely protect us at runtime! Consider this snippet where I “forget” to list a pattern in the case statement.

h> case [] of x:xs -> x
*** Exception: <interactive>:9:1-20: Non-exhaustive patterns in case

I would have liked the type system to notice my sloppiness ahead of time. After jumping on #haskell I learned that GHCI does actually notice something is awry, but I have to coax it to tell me.

h> :set -Wall                -- warn about everything
h> :set -Werror              -- treat warnings as errors
h> case [] of [] -> "empty"  -- this could sort of work

<interactive>:15:1: Warning:
Pattern match(es) are non-exhaustive
In a case alternative: Patterns not matched: _ : _

<no location info>:
Failing due to -Werror.

The reason that a missing case is not considered an error is that it is not always feasible to determine all possibilities. Sometimes a function parameter can come from another module, and GHC does not do whole-program analysis. Some people defensively write a default case like this

h> case [] of x:_ -> x ; _ -> "some info about the function"
"some info about the function"

In the future I’ll be on the lookout for partial functions inside conditionals, and will try to replace them with pattern matching.

Oh, and coming back down to earth… would anyone like to share their most elegant implementation of fizzbuzz? :)