[Haskell-beginners] help with IO guards

[Miro Karpis]

many thanks! I will take a look at it.

cheers and thanks to all :-)

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 10:28 PM, Christopher Allen <cma at bitemyapp.com>
wrote:

> I haven't seen anybody explain the real reasons you can't yank `a` out of
> something of type `IO a`, so I thought I'd attempt to clear a few things up.
>
> It's true that you cannot *in general* extract a value of type `a` from
> something of type `Monad m => m a` but those reasons are *not* why you
> can't in the case of IO. You can't with Monad in general because the
> typeclass doesn't provide a method with the type `m a -> a`, in fact, it
> only provides the opposite: `a -> m a`.
>
> The real reason you can't pattern match on or otherwise extract values
> from IO is that it's an abstract datatype - on purpose. The constructor is
> not exported, the internals are hidden.
>
> You are using a non-strict programming language. The IO datatype is how
> the implementation knows not to replace the thunk with its value when
> evaluated.
>
> Want to see what I mean?
>
> Play with some code that uses
> https://hackage.haskell.org/package/time-1.3/docs/Data-Time-Clock.html#v:getCurrentTime
> to get the current time. Note how each time you force evaluation of the `IO
> UTCTime` you're getting a new UTCTime each time. Then wrap it in
> `unsafePerformIO` - it'll only get executed once. This is *definitely* not
> the semantics you want, you're too new to know when you'd want the unsafe*
> functions for now.
>
> If you aren't comfortable with monads, no amount of thrashing is going to
> let you avoid using Functor/Applicative/Monad if you want to interact with
> values produced in IO.
>
> I wrote a guide for learning Haskell, it covers Functor/Applicative/Monad
> which are *everywhere* - not just for use with IO. This is the guide:
> https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell
>
> There are people used to teaching and assisting with the courses
> recommended in my guide (cis194 & NICTA course) on Freenode IRC at
> #haskell-beginners. There are tons of people equipped to help you in
> #haskell as well.
>
> --- Chris Allen
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 3:12 PM, Julian Birch <julian.birch at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Going back to an earlier question: a monad is a bit like a roach motel.
>> You can check in but you can't leave. (This isn't true of every Monad, but
>> the point is there's no guarantees.) In particular, you can't go from IO
>> String to String _at all_. But you can, through Functor, pass it to a
>> function that takes a plain String. And through Monad, you can turn IO
>> (IO String) back to IO String.
>>
>> Hope this helps.
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, January 15, 2015, Marcin Mrotek <marcin.jan.mrotek at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> A list ([]) is also a monad, and a String is defined as a list of
>>> characters ([Char]). So in your example, it's as if you were trying to
>>> use (>>=) operator on two different monads ([] and IO), which is
>>> impossible. To make a pure value a monadic value, you need to use
>>> return:
>>>
>>> g = readLn >>= (\a -> return (f a))
>>>
>>> which is equivalent to composing f with return:
>>>
>>> g = readLn >>= return.f
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Marcin
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Beginners mailing list
>>> Beginners at haskell.org
>>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sent from an iPhone, please excuse brevity and typos.
>>
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>>
>
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