chains of IORefs

[Richard Uhtenwoldt]

using IORefs, one can construct linked lists in Haskell
that resemble one's used in imperative C programming.

eg, the following toy code creates a chain of 1000 linked records.

import IOExts

data Record= RecordNil
           | Record String Int Chain
type Chain = IORef Record

main=makeChain [1..1000]

makeChain::[Int]->IO Chain
makeChain     []=newIORef RecordNil
makeChain (a:as)=makeChain as>>= \chain->
                     newIORef (Record "data" a chain)

such structures will be garbage-collected "automatically", right?

in general terms, please comment on how well GHC supports code
that uses such structures.


(I have no reason to suspect it would not be well-supported, but
it never hurts to verify assumptions before plunging into coding.)


now, to turn makeChain into a "lazy producer" requires adding an IO
to the type of Chain, yielding 

type Chain=IO (IORef Record)

please comment on how well GHC would tend to support such a type.