slides.md

% Exceptions and Errors in Haskell % Peter Jones
pjones@devalot.com % January 8, 2014

Exceptions

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Creative Commons image by gynti

Most languages make a distinction between values that represent failure (errors) and the mechanism to abort computations and unwind the stack (exceptions.) Haskell is unique in that the type system makes it safe and easy to build failure into types instead of lumping everything into something like NULL or -1.

It also stands out by supporting exceptions through a library of functions and types instead of directly in the syntax of the language. The fact that there's no dedicated keywords for exceptions might seem weird until you discover how flexible and expressive Haskell is.

This presentation aims to show how closely related errors and exceptions are, and how to keep them separate.

Haskell Exceptions

• No dedicated syntax

• Very limited in Haskell 2010

• Expanded by GHC

Type Inhabitants

In order to understand how exceptions work we first need to talk about type inhabitants and bottom.

The Bool type is a very simple type that doesn't use any type variables and only has 2 data constructors. This means that there can only be 2 unique values for this type. Or does it?

Bottom (⊥)

All types in Haskell support a value called bottom. This means that the Bool type actually has 3 possible values. Exceptions and non-termination are examples of bottom values.

The list below illustrates that bottom values aren't a problem until they're evaluated.

Creating ⊥

Haskell includes 2 functions for creating bottom values: undefined and error. In GHC undefined is implemented using error and error throws an exception.

You can create a bottom value directly by writing a non-terminating function.

-- Raises exceptions in GHC:
undefined :: a
error :: String -> a

-- Non-termination:
badBoy :: a
badBoy = badBoy

Catching Exceptions (Inline)

Catching exceptions is straight forward as long as you remember that you can only catch exceptions in the IO monad.

The second argument to catch is a function to handle a caught exception. GHC uses the type of the function to determine if it can handle the caught exception. If GHC can't infer the type of the function you'll need to add a type annotation like in the example above. This requires the ScopedTypeVariables extension.

If you want to handle more than one exception type you'll need to use something like the catches function. To catch all possible exceptions you can catch the SomeException type since it's at the top of the exception type hierarchy. This isn't generally wise and instead you should use something like the bracket or finally functions.

One interesting thing to note is that GHC differs from Haskell 2010 with regards to catch. Haskell 2010 states that catch should catch all exceptions regardless of their type. Probably because those exceptions would all be IOErrors.

Catching Exceptions (w/ a Helper)

Below is another example of catching exceptions. This time a helper function with an explicit type signature is used to handle the exception. This allows us to avoid inline type annotations and the ScopedTypeVariables extension.

Throwing Exceptions

Throwing exceptions is really easy, although you must be in the IO monad to do so. Haskell 2010 provides a set of functions for creating and raising exceptions.

Haskell 2010:

-- Create an exception.
userError :: String -> IOError

-- Raise an exception.
ioError :: IOError -> IO a

-- fail from the IO Monad is both.
fail = ioError . userError :: String -> IO a

Throwing Exceptions

GHC adds on to Haskell 2010 with functions like throwIO and throw. The throw function allows you to raise an exception in pure code and is considered to be a misfeature.

GHC:

Throwing from Pure Code

As mentioned above, GHC adds a throw function that allows you to raise an exception from pure code. Unfortunately this makes it very difficult to catch.

Catching Exceptions From throw

You need to ensure that values are evaluated because they might contain unevaluated exceptions.

In the example below you'll notice the use of the "$!" operator. This forces evaluation to WHNF so exceptions don't sneak out of the catch function as unevaluated thunks.

Creating Custom Exceptions

Any type can be used as an exception as long as it's an instance of the Exception type class. Deriving from the Typeable class makes creating the Exception instance trivial. However, using Typeable means you need to enable the DeriveDataTypeable GHC extension.

You can also automatically derive the Show instance as with most other types, but creating one manually allows you to write a more descriptive message for the custom exception.

Threads and Exceptions

Concurrency greatly complicates exception handling. The GHC runtime uses exceptions to send various signals to threads. You also need to be very careful with unevaluated thunks exiting from a thread when it terminates.

Additional problems created by concurrency:

• Exceptions are used to kill threads

• Exceptions are asynchronous

• Need to mask exceptions in critical code

• Probably don't want unevaluated exceptions leaking out

There's a Package For That

Just use the async package.

Errors (Instead of Exceptions)

• Explicit

• Checked by the compiler

• Way better than NULL or -1

Stupid

Haskell is great about forcing programmers to deal with problems at compile time. That said, it's still possible to write code which may not work at runtime. Especially with partial functions.

The function below will throw an exception at runtime if it's given an empty list. This is because head is a partial function and only works with non-empty lists.

Better

Prefer errors to exceptions.

A better approach is to avoid the use of head and pattern match the list directly. The function below is total since it can handle lists of any length (including infinite lists).

Of course, if the list or its head is bottom (⊥) then this function will throw an exception when the patterns are evaluated.

Reusing Existing Functions

This is the version I like most because it reuses existing functions that are well tested.

The listToMaybe function comes with the Haskell Platform. It takes a list and returns its head in a Just. If the list is empty it returns Nothing. Alternatively you can use the headMay function from the Safe package.

Providing Error Messages

Another popular type when dealing with failure is Either which allows you to return a value with an error. It's common to include an error message using the Left constructor.

Beyond Maybe and Either it's also common to define your own type that indicates success or failure. We won't discuss this further.

Maybe and Either

Maybe and Either are also monads!

If you have several functions that return one of these types you can use do notation to sequence them and abort the entire block on the first failure. This allows you to write short code that implicitly checks the return value of every function.

Things tend to get a bit messy when you mix monads though...

Maybe and IO

The code below demonstrates mixing two monads, IO and Maybe. Clearly we want to be able to perform I/O but we also want to use the Maybe type to signal when a file doesn't exist. This isn't too complicated, but what happens when we want to use the power of the Maybe monad to short circuit a computation when we encounter a Nothing?

Maybe and IO

Because IO is the outer monad and we can't do without it, we sort of lose the superpowers of the Maybe monad.

MaybeT

Using the MaybeT monad transformer we can make IO the inner monad and restore the Maybe goodness. We don't really see the benefit in the sizeT function but note that its complexity remains about the same.

MaybeT

The real payoff comes in the addT function. Compare with the add function above.

Either and IO

This version using Either is nearly identical to the Maybe version above. The only difference is that we can now report the name of the file which doesn't exist.

Either and IO

To truly abort the add function when one of the files doesn't exist we'd need to replicate the nested case code from the Maybe example. Here I'm cheating and using Either's applicative instance. However, this doesn't short circuit the second file test if the first fails.

ErrorT

The ErrorT monad transformer is to Either what MaybeT is to Maybe. Again, changing size to work with a transformer isn't that big of a deal.

ErrorT

But it makes a big difference in the addT function.

Hidden/Internal ErrorT

The really interesting thing is that we didn't actually have to change size at all. We could have retained the non-transformer version and used the ErrorT constructor to lift the size function into the transformer. The MaybeT constructor can be used in a similar way.

Turning Exceptions into Errors

The try function allows us to turn exceptions into errors in the form of IO and Either, or as you now know, ErrorT.

It's not hard to see how flexible exception handling in Haskell is, in no small part due to it not being part of the syntax. Non-strict evaluation is the other major ingredient.

try :: Exception e => IO a -> IO (Either e a)

-- Which is equivalent to:
try :: Exception e => IO a -> ErrorT e IO a

Final Thought

• Prefer Errors to Exceptions!

• Don't Write/Use Partial Functions!