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When creating a command-line app, one usually has to do some kind of parsing of command-line arguments, and print an error message if a different number of arguments is expected, or they do not make sense. For the sake of simplicity let's say that a program takes a positive integer as its only argument. Parsing and further program execution in Haskell can be done like this:
main :: IO ()
main = do
args <- getArgs
case args of
[arg] -> case readMaybe arg :: Maybe Int of
Just n | n > 0 -> runProg n
Just n -> die $ "expected a positive integer (got: " <> show n <> ")"
Nothing -> die $ "expected an integer (got: " <> arg <> ")"
_ -> die $ "expected exactly one argument (got: " <> show (length args) <> ")"
Creation of appropriate error message feels clunky to me, especially combined with show anywhere I want to include a non-string argument. There is printf but this on the other hand feels... not Haskell-y. What would be the idiomatic approach here? Perhaps my bias against the methods I listed is unjustified and it is, in fact, idiomatic Haskell?
As per the comment, if you're actually parsing command line arguments, you probably want to use optparse-applicative (or maybe optparse).
More generally, I think a reasonably idiomatic way of constructing complex error messages in Haskell is to represent the errors with an algebraic data type:
data OptError
= BadArgCount Int Int -- expected, actual
| NotInteger String
| NotPositive Int
supply a pretty-printer:
errorMessage :: OptError -> String
errorMessage (BadArgCount exp act) = "expected " <> show exp
<> " arguments, got " <> show act
errorMessage (NotInteger str) = "expected integer, got " <> show str
errorMessage (NotPositive n) = "expected positive integer, got " <> show n
and perform the processing in a monad that supports throwing errors:
data Args = Args Int
processArgs :: [String] -> Either OptError Args
processArgs [x] = case readMaybe x of
Just n | n > 0 -> pure $ Args n
| otherwise -> throwError $ NotPositive n
Nothing -> throwError $ NotInteger x
processArgs xs = throwError $ BadArgCount 1 (length xs)
This is certainly overkill for argument processing in a small command-line utility, but it works well in other contexts that demand complex error reporting, and it has several advantages over the die ... approach:
All the error messages are tabulated in one place, so you know exactly what errors the processArgs function can throw.
Error construction is type checked, reducing the potential for errors in your error handling code.
Error reporting is separated from error rendering. This is useful for internationalization, separate error reporting styles for terminal and non-terminal output, reuse of the functions in driver code that wants to handle errors itself, etc. It's also more ergonomic for development, since you don't have to take a break from "real coding" to make up a sensible error message. This typically results in better error reporting in the final product, since it encourages you to write a clear, consistent set of error messages all at once, after the core logic is finished.
It facilitates refactoring the errors systematically, for example to add location information (not relevant for command line arguments, but relevant for errors in input files, for example), or to add hints/recommendations for correction.
It's relatively easy to define a custom monad that also supports warnings and "non-fatal" errors that allow further error checking to continue, generating a list of errors all at once, instead of failing after the first error.
I haven't used this approach for command line arguments, since I usually use optparse-applicative. But, I have used it when coding up interpreters.
I'm considering the problem of splitting a string s at a character c.
This is expressed as
break (c ==) s
where the Haskell library definition of break (c ==) close enough to
br [] = ([],[])
br s#(h:t) = if (c == h)
then ([],s)
else let (h',t') = br t in (h:h',t')
(And let's suppose that I immediately wanted access to the second item of the return value, so that any lazy evaluation has been forced through.) The recursive call to br t appears to store h on the call stack, but a general sense of the algorithm indicates that this shouldn't be necessary. Here is one way of doing it in constant stack space, in a pseudocode language with mutability, where & denotes passage by reference, and lists are implemented as LISPy pairs:
br(c,s) =
allocate res_head,res_rest
iter(c,s,&res_head,&res_rest)
return (res_head,res_rest)
iter(c,s,&res_head,&res_rest) =
case s of
[] -> set res_head = res_rest = [] -- and terminate
c:ss -> set res_head = [], res_rest = s -- and terminate
x:ss -> allocate new_pair
set res_head = new_pair, new_pair.head = x
iter(c,ss,&new_pair.tail,&res_rest) -- tail call / jump
Whether or not GHC is smart enough to find this optimization, I'd like to formulate the computation in Haskell in a manner that is patently tail-recursive. How might one do this?
Tail recursive breakAt
The standard accumulator introduction trick would produce something like this:
breakAt :: Char -> String -> (String, String)
breakAt needle = breakAtAcc []
where breakAtAcc :: String -> String -> (String, String)
breakAtAcc seen [] = (reverse seen, [])
breakAtAcc seen cs#(c:cs')
| c == needle
= (reverse seen, cs)
| otherwise
= breakAtAcc (c : seen) cs'
The recursive part of this is tail recursive, although we process the characters that make up the pre-split part of the return value in the wrong order for building up a list, so they need to be reversed at the end. However even ignoring that (using a version without the reverse), this is probably worse.
In Haskell you're worrying about the wrong thing if you're concerned about the stack overflow errors you would see from deep recursion in many other languages (often prevented by tail call optimisation, hence tail recursion being desirable). Haskell does not have this kind of stack overflow. Haskell does have a stack, which can overflow, but it's not the normal call stack from imperative languages.
For example, if I start GHCi with ghci +RTS -K65k to explicitly set the maximum stack size to 65 KB (about the smallest value I could get it to start up with), then tripping the standard foldr (+) stack overflow doesn't take much:
λ foldr (+) 0 [1..3000]
*** Exception: stack overflow
A mere 3,000 recursive steps kills it. But I can run your br on much larger lists without problem:
λ let (pre, post) = br 'b' (replicate 100000000 'a' ++ "b") in (length pre, length post)
(100000000,1)
it :: (Int, Int)
That's 100 million non-tail recursive steps. If each of those took a stack frame and they were fitting in out 65 KB stack, we'd be getting about 1500 stack frames for every byte. Clearly this kind of recursion does not actually cause the stack consumption problems it does in other languages! That's because it's not the recursion depth itself that's causing the stack overflow in foldr (+) 0 [1..3000]. (See the last section at the end if you want to know what does cause it)
The advantage br has over a tail-recursive version like breakAt is that it's productive. If you're only interested in the first n characters of the prefix, then at most n characters of the input string will be examined (if you're interested in the post-split string, then obviously it will need to examine enough of the string to find the split). You can observe this by running br and breakAt on a long input string and taking small bit of prefix, something like this:
λ let (pre, post) = br 'b' (replicate 100000000 'a' ++ "b") in take 5 pre
"aaaaa"
it :: [Char]
If you try the same thing with breakAt (even if you take out the call to reverse), it'll at first only print " and then spend a long time thinking before eventually coming up with the rest of "aaaaa". That's because it has to find the split point before it returns anything except another recursive call; the first character of the prefix is not available until the split point has been reached. And that's the essence of tail recursion; there's no way to fix it.
You can see it even more definitively by using undefined:
λ let (pre, post) = br 'b' ("12345" ++ undefined) in take 5 pre
"12345"
it :: [Char]
λ let (pre, post) = breakAtRev 'b' ("12345" ++ undefined) in take 5 pre
"*** Exception: Prelude.undefined
CallStack (from HasCallStack):
error, called at libraries/base/GHC/Err.hs:74:14 in base:GHC.Err
undefined, called at <interactive>:18:46 in interactive:Ghci8
br can return the first 5 characters without examining whether or not there is a 6th. breakAt (with or without reverse) forces more of the input, and so hits the undefined.
This is a common pattern in Haskell. Changing an algorithm to make it tail recursive frequently makes performance worse. You do want tail recursion if the final return value is a small type like an Int, Double, etc that can't be consumed in a "gradual" way; but you need to make sure any accumulator parameter you're using is strictly evaluated in that case! That's why for summing a list foldl' is better than foldr; there's no way to consume the sum "gradually" so we want tail recursion like foldl, but it has to be the strict variant foldl' or we still get stack overflows even though it's tail recursive! But when you're returning something like a list or a tree, it's much better if you can arrange for consuming the result gradually to cause the input to be read gradually. Tail recursion fundamentally does not allow this.
What causes stack consumption in Haskell?
Haskell is lazy. So when you call a recursive function it doesn't necessarily run all the way to the "bottom" of the recursion immediately as it would in a strict language (requiring the stack frames from every level of the recursion to be "live" at once, if they can't be optimised away by something like tail call elimination). It doesn't necessarily run at all of course, only when the result is demanded, but even then "demand" causes the function to run only as far as "weak head normal form". That has a fancy technical definition, but it more-or-less means the function will run until it has produced a data constructor.
So if the function's code itself returns a data constructor, as br does (all of its cases return the pair constructor (,)), then entering the function will be complete at the end of that one single step. The data constructor's fields may contain thunks for further recursive calls (as they do in br), but those recursive calls will only be actually run when something pattern matches on this constructor to extract those fields, and then pattern matches on them. Often that is just about to happen, because the pattern match on the returned constructor is what caused the demand to run this function in the first place, but it is still resolved after this function returns. And so any recursive calls in the constructor's fields don't have to be made while the first call is "still running", and thus we don't have to keep a call stack frame around for it when we enter the recursive calls. (I'm sure the actual GHC implementation does lots of fancy tricks I'm not covering, so this picture probably isn't correct in detail, but it's an accurate enough mental model for how the language "works")
But what if the code for the function doesn't return a data constructor directly? What if instead it returns another function call? Function calls aren't run until their return value is demanded, but the function we're considering was only run because its return value was demanded. That means the function call it returns is also demanded, so we have to enter it.
We can use tail call elimination to avoid needing a call stack frame for this too. But what if the code for this function makes a pattern match (or uses seq, or strictness analysis decided demand its arguments early, etc etc)? If the thing it's matching on is already evaluated to a data constructor then that's fine, it can run the pattern match now. But if the thing that's matching is itself a thunk, that means we have to enter some random other function and run it far enough to produce its outermost data constructor. Now we need a stack frame to remember where to come back to when that other function is done.
So stack consumption happens in Haskell not directly from call depth, but from "pattern match depth" or "demand depth"; the depth of thunks we have to enter without finding the outermost data constructor.
So br is totally fine for this sort of stack consumption; all of its branches immediately return a pair constructor (,). The recursive case has thunks for another call to br in its fields, but as we've seen that does not cause stack growth.
In the case of breakAt (or rather breakAtAcc), the return value in the recursive case is another function call we have to enter. We only get to a point where we can stop (a data constructor) after running all the way to the split point. So we lose laziness and productivity, but it still won't cause a stack overflow because of tail call elimination.
The problem with foldr (+) 0 [1..3000] is it returns 0 + <thunk>. That's not a data constructor, it's a function call to +, so it has to be entered. But + is strict in both arguments so before it returns it's going to pattern match on the thunk, requiring us to run it (and thus add a stack frame). That thunk will evaluate foldr (+) 1 [2..3000] to 1 + <thunk>, and entering + again will force that thunk to 2 + thunk, and so on, eventually exhausting the stack. But the call depth of foldr technically does no harm, rather it's the nested + thunks that foldr generates that consume the stack. If you could write a similar giant chain of additions literally (and GHC evaluated that naively without rewriting anything), the same stack overflow would happen with no call depth at all. And if you use foldr with a different function you can process infinite lists to an unbounded depth with no stack consumption at all.
TLDR
You can have a tail recursive break, but it's worse than the version in base. Deep recursion is a problem for strict languages that use a call stack, but not for Haskell. Deep pattern matching is the analogous problem, but it takes more than counting recursion depth to spot that. So trying to make all your recursion be tail recursion in Haskell will frequently make your code worse.
When I run this code:
test1 :: Int -> String
test1 x = do
if x == 1
then "Hello"
I get the following error:
test-if.hs:4:21: error:
parse error (possibly incorrect indentation or mismatched brackets)
I am not sure why this is as I am not using any brackets and I am using 4 spaces as my tabs. Adding brackets doesn't seem to help. What could be the issue?
Thanks
Your if needs an else (what do you want the value to be when x isn't 1?).
Furthermore do notation is used when working with monads and doesn't make sense in this function.
I created a new quick.hs file in the ghci.exe directory. And the content is
quicksort::(Ord a)=>[a]->[a]
quicksort []=[]
quicksort (x:xs)=
let smaller = [a |a<-xs,a<=x]
larger = [a |a<-xs,a>x]
in quicksort smaller ++ [x] ++ quicksort larger
When I issue :l quick in the ghci command lline, the output is
Prelude> :l quick
[1 of 1] Compiling Main ( quick.hs, interpreted )
quick.hs:5:17: error:
parse error on input ‘=’
Perhaps you need a 'let' in a 'do' block?
e.g. 'let x = 5' instead of 'x = 5'
Failed, modules loaded: none.
I have concured this kind of problems many times. What's wrong on earth?
You say in the comments that you are sure there are no tab characters in the source file, but inspecting the source of your question, indeed there is one right before the in token. Replace that with the appropriate number of spaces and you'll be all good.
You have to remove all tabs and change it by spaces. I hope that this instruction helps you.
I am getting this error:
sky.hs:3:5: error: parse error on input `|'
This is the code:
sky list
| (length list) /= 1 = reverse (last(even (sky list)) : reverse(odd list)
| otherwise = list
Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? I have made sure that there are no tabs, just 4 spaces before the | symbol. This might seem like a novice question but I am a beginner in Haskell.