> In Haskell, functions do not fail in traditional sense - they just return indication of failure. That's too general a statement. Haskell functions certainly

> In Haskell, functions do not fail in traditional sense - they just return indication of failure. That's too general a statement. Haskell functions certainly can fail in the traditional sense. As a trivial example, "head []" is a well-typed Haskell expression that will raise an exception when evaluated; if the exception is not caught (using a traditional exception handler), then it propagates to an error, and the program exits. This article [1] about the many ways to handle errors in Haskell is a bit old, but as far as I know, all his points are still relevant. The conclusion (for me) is that if modern Haskell tends to use return-values on failure, it's due to convention (and good taste) among developers, and not due to a design constraint of the language. [1] http://www.randomhacks.net/2007/03/10/haskell-8-ways-to-report-errors/ http://www.randomhacks.net/2007/03/10/haskell-8-ways-to-repo...