[Haskell-beginners] computation vs function

[Daniel Carrera]

Brent Yorgey wrote:
> "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.

Thanks. That helps a lot.

It looks to me that one could replace the word "computation" everywhere 
in the article with "monadic type" (where again, "monadic type" is just 
an intuition for "m a" where m is a Monad) and the article would be 
equally correct. Am I right?

The Wikipedia article seems to use "monadic type" for the same things 
that ertes calls "computation".

I can't decide which term gives better intuition. The term "computation" 
makes binding more intuitive: The computation (m a) returns a value of 
type "a" can then be fed into a function of type (a -> m b). On the 
other hand, "monadic type" is more intuitive when you write "Maybe Int" 
or "IO String".

Anyways, thanks for the help. I'm (slowly) making progress.

Cheers,
Daniel.