Yet Another Monad Tutorial

[Malcolm Wallace]

> "blaat blaat" <l4t3r@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > However, given that observation, the fact that IO is a monad I find to
> > be a _rather arbitrary design decision_; why not define a small term
> > language which may be passed to the OS? 

Derek Elkins <ddarius@hotpop.com> writes:

> That would be confusing to use or restrictive (unless done exceedingly
> well perhaps), it would be awkward to define, and it would pretty much
> require arbitrary design decisions (what should be included in this
> language? what are it's semantics? etc).

In fact, between language versions 1.0 and 1.2, Haskell had exactly
this small term language for I/O.  The result of a program was a stream
of explicitly constructed 'Request's to be passed to the environment,
whilst the input to the program was a stream of 'Response's from the
environment.  As you say, the term language was somewhat arbitrary
and restricted, so the language designers abandoned it in favour of
the more extensible monadic model in Haskell 1.3 onwards.

Regards,
    Malcolm