Is it generally considered a bad practice to use non-exhaustive pattern machings in functional languages like Haskell or F#, which means that the cases specified don t cover all possible input cases?
In particular, should I allow code to fail with a MatchFailureException etc. or should I always cover all cases and explicitly throw an error if necessary?
Example:
let head (x::xs) = x
Or
let head list =
match list with
| x::xs -> x
| _ -> failwith "Applying head to an empty list"
F# (unlike Haskell) gives a warning for the first code, since the []-case is not covered, but can I ignore it without breaking functional style conventions for the sake of succinctness? A MatchFailure does state the problem quite well after all ...
