[Haskell-beginners] computation vs function

[Brent Yorgey]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 10:38:14PM +0200, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have finished the tutorial at http://ertes.de/articles/monads.html and my 
> understanding of monads has increased greatly. I still need to cement some 
> concepts in my mind. What exactly is the difference between a computation 
> and a function? Monads revolve around computations, so I'd like to 
> understand computations better.

"Computation" does not really have any technical meaning, it's just
supposed to be an intuition.  But the term "computation" is often used
to refer to things of type (m a) where m is a Monad.  You can clearly
see from the types that something of type (m a) is different than
something of type (a -> b).  The former takes no inputs and somehow
produces value(s) of type a; the latter takes something of type a as
input and produces something of type b as output.

However, you could also legitimately thing of things of type (a -> b)
as "computations"; more interestingly, you can think of things of type
(a -> m b) as "parameterized computations" which can be composed in
nice ways.

Don't rely too heavily on the "computation" idea; monads certainly
don't "revolve around computations", it's only one particular way of
giving intuition for monads which does.

-Brent