Hi all, I have some design questions - not for Haskell but for the Java+Vavr combo, but I am about to dip my toes into actual work in a functional manner, as far as that is possible, and I thought I might as well go for the community that's best subscribed to a purely functional style. Bird's eye view: Java everybody knows (I don't like it either, no worries), Vavr is a - to my eyes - pretty nice functional library, https://docs.vavr.io/ for details if you're actually interested. I want to leverage Vavr to get a Java program to be as Haskell-ish as is reasonable; that's not going to be much by a Haskeller's standards, but... baby steps. Application is a simple command-line thing: Read configuration from command line and configuration file, emit diagnostics about any errors in the config, then process. I want the configuration processing to be as functional as reasonable, given the constraints. However, I'm undecides about many things, no doubt because I simply don't know the best design patterns, and it's frustrating to see multiple options and not knowing which ones will paint me into a corner and which ones will not. Things I'm undecided about: a) Data type variations During the configuration phase, I need to carry information about where some configuration item came from (its ("context", usually file, line number, column number). In the processing phase, configuration is considered final and error-free, so context is not needed (that's a done design decision). I could carry context information into the processing phase, but it's going to be awkward: Say, we have the following types (forgive the most un-Haskellish pseudo syntax but I don't dare to use Haskell style because I'd almost certainly get that wrong and provoke misunderstandings) DirectoryConfig { ConfigData<Path> path ConfigData<String> title ... } data ConfigData<a> { String fileName int lineNumber int columnNumber a value } but in the processing phase I don't want my config objects polluted with context, so I want DirectoryConfig { Path path String title ... } No idea how to deal with that. I'd use code generation in Java I guess, but that's horribly inelegant and complicated to set up (no, I don't particularly like Java, it's just what I'm currently using). So... how would one do such a thing in a functional language? Not necessarily Haskell, I guess some language extensions exist for that kind of stuff, but I'm more-or-less tied to Java + functional libraries, so I'll have to stick with the more basic approaches most likely. Besides, even if I did Haskell, I'd want to avoid the advanced stuff until I get confident in the basics. TL;DR: I have a deeply nested configuration data structure where each field has a "context", i.e. the place it came from; how to I make it so that the context is available during configuration evaluation but is unavailable in the later processing phase? I hope this is understandable; it's really hard to do that when you don't even know enough to ask the questions precisely enough. Regards, Jo