[Haskell-cafe] RFC: Handling marginally bad data via logging "soft-errors"

[Patrick Mylund Nielsen]

On 4/12/2017 10:59 AM, Saurabh Nanda wrote:
> OPTION 1: Use unsafePerformIO to avoid making an otherwise pure
> function, "impure", i.e.
>
>     parseName :: HStore -> FullName -- uses unsafePerformIO to log
> soft-errors
>
> OPTION 2: Put the data transformation function in IO or the app-wide
> monad AppM because it will call the logging function, i.e.
>
>     parseName :: HStore -> AppM FullName
>
>
> OPTION 3: Use a wrapper over Writer monad, called ErrorCollector, that
> forces the calling function to log while accessing the underlying value,
> i.e.
>
>     parseName :: HStore -> ErrorCollector FullName
>     logErrorAndExtract extraLoggingContext (parseName hstoreVal)

May I suggest a fourth option: Keep the utility functions such as
parsing pure, and do the logging in the IO threads that are calling
them. This is a nice way to keep from polluting general-purpose
functions with I/O, whether unsafe or not.

If the calling thread doesn't have enough information to produce a
meaningful log message, the pure function could return it as part of a Left.