[Haskell-beginners] computation vs function

[Philippa Cowderoy]

On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 22:38 +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.
> 

Computations are like "procedures" in other languages - you run them[1],
they yield a value. Conceptually, functions are (potentially infinite)
maps from their input to their output. We sometimes call functions with
types like "Int -> IO ()" monadic functions as well, which may also mean
the combination of the function and then the computation that results -
by analogy to functions in languages like C.

[1] Sometimes the runtime system runs them for you, like main. Sometimes
the computation is already its (lazily evaluated) output, like with
lists or Maybe.

-- 
Philippa Cowderoy <flippa at flippac.org>