Yet Another Monad Tutorial

[Antony Courtney]

Peter G. Hancock wrote:
>>>>>>Jeff Newbern wrote (on Tue, 12 Aug 2003 at 17:20):
?
>     > The functions exported from the IO module do not
>     > perform I/O themselves. They return I/O actions, which describe an I/O
>     > operation to be performed. The I/O actions are combined within the IO
>     > monad (in a purely functional manner) to create more complex I/O
>     > actions, resulting in the final I/O action that is the main value of the
>     > program. The result of the Haskell compiler is an executable function
>     > incorporating the main I/O action. Executing the program "applies" this
>     > ultimate I/O action to the outside world to produce a new state of the
>     > world. 
> 
> That seems to me the wrong thing to say.  There is no application.  Whether
> or not the word is put in quotes, it is something involving a function
> and an argument.  An IO action is not a function.

So then, in your view, what *is* an IO action?

One conceptual model is that an IO action with type (IO a) denotes a 
function of type World -> (World,a).  Given that model, "applying" an IO 
action to the external world seems like a perfectly reasonable account 
of executing such an action.

	-antony

-- 
Antony Courtney
Grad. Student, Dept. of Computer Science, Yale University
antony@apocalypse.org          http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/antony