[tel]

I've personally found it very easy to handle "exceptions" in Haskell. Partial answers feel "bad" in Haskell because all the core functionality is clean enough to not need them, but on the other hand that makes for some of the best tools around for dealing with partiality.

[JadeNB]

> Partial answers feel "bad" in Haskell because all the core functionality is clean enough to not need them

Not to need them, sure, but not not to use them. (I swear that's the right number of 'not's.) I don't understand why something like Neil Mitchell's `Safe` isn't just the way that things are done by default.

[tel]

Ugh, yeah, total agreement here. Historical accident, I suppose. I try to pretend like `head` and `tail` just don't exist.

You can always recognize a file where I'm doing list ops because I define `uncons :: [a] -> Maybe (a, [a])` at the top of the file, haha.

[mightybyte]

Even better than safe, all this has been consolidated very nicely in the errors package.