[Haskell-cafe] Converting IO [XmlTree] to [XmlTree]

[Luke Palmer]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Cristiano Paris <frodo at theshire.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Luke Palmer <lrpalmer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > ...
> > Please don't say that.  He's a beginner.
> > You realize that the path of least resistance will be to use it, right?
> > You see why that's not a good thing?
> > Even experts don't use this function.
> > (To the O.P.:  don't use it)
>
> Mmmh, sorry Luke but I don't understand this ostracism.
>
> unsafePerformIO is not "evil" by itself, it's there for a purpose and,
> as for anything else in the language, it's better to understand when
> to use it and when not rather than just knowing that is something that
> MUST not be used, without any further explanation.


You have a point.  I would like to avoid introducing unfounded authoritarian
stigmas whenever possible.

However, the way I see it is that unsafePerformIO *is* evil by itself, and
it is only by the addition of Holy Water that it is benign to use.

Ryan Ingram described it as a way to achieve "RTS extensions", which I think
is a fine way to put it   I consider Debug.Trace to be an instance of this:
we are extending the RTS to provide execution traces.

I guess it's a teaching style thing.  Mostly, if someone sees "I have an IO
[XmlTree] and I need an [XmlTree]", I want the "I'm asking the wrong
question" synapse path to fire, rather than the "just use unsafePerformIO"
one.

Luke


>
> More, from my personal experience, knowing unsafePerformIO helped me
> understand better what Monads are and how they should be used.
>
> I wounder what so-called "experts" have to say about this.
>
> Cristiano
>
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