How can I avoid writing boilerplate code for functions performing pattern matching?

Question

In this response to another question, a little Haskell code sketch was given which uses wrapper functions to factor out some code for doing syntax checking on command line argum

Answer 1

You might want to make use of existing libraries to deal with command line arguments. I believe the de-facto standard right now is cmdargs, but other options exist, such as ReadArgs and console-program.