[zoomerang]

Well yes and no. GHC does a pretty good job of warning you when you're missing a potential option in a pattern match, and it's generally pretty easy to write code that avoids partial functions as a result. But still, you're right - it's not 100% safety, and will only give you a warning.

There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater though, since 90% safety is a hell of a lot better than 0% safety.

Personally I'm keen to see mainstream languages adopt better totality checking for that exact reason - my fantasy language would enforce that `main` is always a total function*

*(For this fantasy language, I'd probably allow infinite recursion to still exist, since the halting problem is theoretically impossible to solve without introducing a lot of pain to prove that your code will actually terminate, and that level of totality checking is often counter-productive for general-purpose code)