How to implement early exit / return in Haskell?

Posted by Giorgio on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Giorgio
Published on 2012-12-20T10:55:59Z Indexed on 2012/12/20 11:12 UTC
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I am porting a Java application to Haskell. The main method of the Java application follows the pattern:

public static void main(String [] args)
{
  if (args.length == 0)
  {
    System.out.println("Invalid number of arguments.");

    System.exit(1);
  }

  SomeDataType d = getData(arg[0]);
  if (!dataOk(d))
  {
    System.out.println("Could not read input data.");

    System.exit(1);
  }

  SomeDataType r = processData(d);
  if (!resultOk(r))
  {
    System.out.println("Processing failed.");

    System.exit(1);
  }

  ...
}

So I have different steps and after each step I can either exit with an error code, or continue to the following step.

My attempt at porting this to Haskell goes as follows:

main :: IO ()
main = do
         a <- getArgs
         if ((length args) == 0)
           then do
                   putStrLn "Invalid number of arguments."
                   exitWith (ExitFailure 1)
           else do
                   -- The rest of the main function goes here.

With this solution, I will have lots of nested if-then-else (one for each exit point of the original Java code).

Is there a more elegant / idiomatic way of implementing this pattern in Haskell? In general, what is a Haskell idiomatic way to implement an early exit / return as used in an imperative language like Java?

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