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    True, but note that Haskell doesn't use this for division by zero. Instead, every Haskell type implicitly has "bottom" as a possible value. This isn't like null pointers in the sense that it's the "value" of an expression that fails to terminate. You can't test for nontermination as a value, of course, but in operational semantics the cases that fail to terminate are part of the meaning of an expression. In Haskell, that "bottom" value also handles additional error-case results such as the error "some message" function being evaluated. Commented Nov 15, 2013 at 16:46
  • Personally, if the effect of aborting the whole program is considered valid, I don't know why pure code can't have the effect of throwing an exception, but that's just me - Haskell doesn't allow pure expressions to throw exceptions. Commented Nov 15, 2013 at 16:49
  • I think this is a good idea because other than throwing an exception, all the proposed options do not communicate to the users that they made a mistake. The basic idea is that the user makes a mistake with the value they gave to the program, so the program should tell the user that they gave wrong input (then the user can think of a way to remedy). Without telling the users about their mistake, any solution feels so odd. Commented Jul 13, 2014 at 5:03
  • I think this is the way to go... The Rust programming language uses it extensively in its standard library. Commented Jul 13, 2014 at 15:13