[Haskell-beginners] Actions v. Functions

[Brandon Allbery]

On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 5:09 PM, MJ Williams
<matthewjwilliams101 at gmail.com>wrote:

>  For example, `main = do input <- getLine ...', where `getLine' is an
> action as distinguished from a function such as `main'.  Other examples of
> actions in Haskell include `print', `putStrLn' and
>

Actions aren't so much a formal thing as a conceptual "handle" to help with
understanding monads. In particular, what a particular action represents
depends on the monad, and in some cases on the particular implementation
(for example, an IO action in GHC is a partially applied function, but this
is an implementation detail that does nothing to help you understand how to
work with it).

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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