Re: [Caml-list] Uncaught exceptions in function type.

[Ben Millwood <bmillwood@janestreet.com>]

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First of all, it seems to be universal among all languages I've much
experience with that there are unchecked exceptions. Your program might be
interrupted at any point by an out of memory error or a signal or
something, and there's just not much you can do about that. You can either
model it in your code or not, but you can't stop it from happening. So it
seems like the best we can hope for with typed exceptions is in addition to
unchecked ones, to make it possible (but not required) that a function
might declare some of the exceptions it can throw.

But after all exceptions are just "things I can return instead of a
result", and lightweight sum types are already pretty good at that. E.g.
(to use Romain's syntax)

    val lookup : map -> key -> value raise Not_found

is pretty much just the same as:

    val lookup : map -> key -> value option

True, exceptions get automatic propagation, but the option monad interface
makes that pretty lightweight, and you can do a similar thing with a less
trivial sum type if you need richer type information.

See also:
https://blogs.janestreet.com/how-to-fail-introducing-or-error-dot-t/ for
discussions of more ways you can make error handling both explicit and
concise.

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