Will Haskell be commercialized in the future?

[D. Tweed]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2000, Frank Atanassow wrote:

> > Java.  Do you think that Haskell would be better without `unsafePerformIO'?
> 
> Without remarking on C#, I just wanted to point out that unsafePerformIO is
> not part of the Haskell language...

Umm, I hope that everyone in the implementors camps feels unsafePerformIO
is a de facto (if not de jure) part of the haskell libraries. I use it an
awful lot, and ironically not to do `imperative' type things but rather to
deal with the case where files on disk, etc, are static over the entire
program lifetime, so that their value can unambiguously be taken to be
their contents, etc. In some ways it's aesthetically annoying that the
same function name is used for both situations where IO isn't strictly
ordered and you don't care if this means you get different file contents
depending on when the read happens to occur, and when a file is
essentially a `raw string CAF that happens to be on disk rather than
compiled in'.

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