Yet Another Monad Tutorial

[Bayley, Alistair]

Thanks. Quite comprehensive.

Peter Van Roy (the Mozart/Oz guy) said this on the PragProg list, and I
didn't have the knowledge to respond. It's a point you might want to
address, perhaps in this section?:
http://www.nomaware.com/monads/html/laws.html#nowayout

I can't decide for myself if he's right or not. It seems to me that monadic
IO functions aren't pure, but that doesn't mean that *all* monadic functions
are impure, does it?

Or could you argue that monadic IO functions are pure: it's just that their
input includes the outside world, which means that you can never invoke an
IO function more than once with the same arguments?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

> Care to explain why you think Haskell is not pure?

Purely functional = you are always defining and calling pure functions.
Calling a pure function with the same arguments always gives the same
results.  In Haskell, if monadic state is used, then this is not true
(there is support from the syntax + type system to hide the state
argument).  So Haskell's monadic state is an implementation of state
*on top of* a purely functional language.

Saying that Haskell is 'purely functional' is reasonable if you want
to present it to non-functional programmers.  But the reality is not
that simple.  It's perhaps better to say that Haskell allows a clear
separation of the purely functional core from the rest, which is a
Good Thing.

It's like saying that Erlang is a functional language.  It's true
that Erlang has a functional core.  But the concurrent message
passing built on top is very important and definitely not functional!

Peter



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Newbern [mailto:jnewbern@yahoo.com]
> Sent: 12 August 2003 10:41
> To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org
> Subject: Yet Another Monad Tutorial
> 
> 
> Hello everyone,
> 
> Due to the scarcity of monad tutorials available (:^), I have
> written one of my own.  I hope that this one is both more gentle
> and more comprehensive than many of the other tutorials out on
> the 'net, and I am looking for feedback from experienced
> Haskellers and novices alike.
> 
> You can find the tutorial at
> 
> http://www.nomaware.com/monads/html/
> 
> The tutorial begins from first principles and introduces the monad
> concept, details the implementation and usage of all of the standard
> monads in Haskell and the monad template library and explains the
> use of monad transformers.  The tutorial contains 23 individual
> sections and 18 files of example code illustrating different monad
> concepts.
> 
> I hope that this tutorial is useful to many people, and I would
> love to hear your experiences and suggestions for improving it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Jeff Newbern
> jnewbern@yahoo.com


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