[Haskell-cafe] Time zones and IO

[Yitzchak Gale]

Ben Gamari wrote:
> Recently I've been working on an iCalendar parser implementation with
> support for recurrence rules.
> For the recurrence logic, I've been
> relying on Chris Heller's excellent time-recurrence
> package.
> Unfortunately, it seems we have both encountered great
> difficulty in cleanly handling time zones...
>           tz = unsafePerformIO getCurrentTimeZone
> Ouch...
> Passing the current timezone as an argument seems heavy-handed and
> reveals the leakiness of the CalendarTimeConvertible abstraction.
> Short of making toCalendarTime an action, can anyone see a
> suitable way of refactoring CalendarTimeConvertible to avoid
> unsafe IO?

Well, timezone info definitely is something from
the outside world, and it even changes over time
(very slowly). So it's IO. Yet just about all of
what your library does is pure. So passing timezone
info as a parameter to pure functions is the most
straightforward approach.

You would pass the timezone as a parameter to
all pure functions that need it. If the need for the tz
parameter is ubiquitous, it might then be worth it to
use a pure reader monad of some kind.

As a convenience, you might provide one or more
functions that do the timezone lookup, do the
pure calculation, and return the result in IO.

All of that does require refactoring CalendarTimeConvertible
though, yes. I think the use of unsafePerformIO
is a pretty sure sign that the design of CalendarTimeConvertible
could use some improvement.

> Perhaps a TimeZoneInfo monad is in order, exposing lookup of arbitrary
> (through timezone-olson) as well the current timezone? It seems like
> this would be inconvenient and overkill, however.

I agree. This whole calculation is pure, really. It would
be a shame to force the entire thing into an impure
monad just because of timezones.

Regards,
Yitz