Newbie question on "statefullness"

[Andrew J Bromage]

G'day all.

On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 10:06:51PM +0100, Alistair Bayley wrote:

> OTOH, if you want to do anything useful with any language you have to learn 
> to do IO (and simple IO is tackled early in most languages), and therefore 
> you must deal with Monads. I often wish that Haskell books and tutorials 
> would introduce IO earlier; it is often near the end, in the "advanced" 
> topics (after you've been dazzled/saturated by the magic you can do with list 
> functions and comprehensions, and how easy it is to create abstract 
> datatypes, and write parsers, etc...).

Being fair for a moment, most Haskell books are intended as
undergraduate computer science textbooks.  There are many purposes
of these introductory courses, but learning a particular programming
language is not one of them.  You can teach a lot of computer science
without getting bogged down in the details of doing IO.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage