"interact" behaves oddly if used interactively

[Simon Marlow]

> > The real problem is that lazy I/O injects side effects into the pure
> > world of expressions.  Haskell has a perfectly good system for
> > encapsulating side effects - the IO monad.  So why put 
> these sneaky side
> > effects into pure values?
> 
> I fear one problem is that the word "side effect" is not properly
> defined.
> 
> Actually both getContents and interact are in the IO monad. Since the
> action "interact" is not terminated until the input stream ends, I do
> not see any problem there.

Yes, it is probably true that you cannot observe any
non-referential-transparency using only interact.  The side effects are
only visible in the IO monad, and since as you say interact doesn't let
you back into the IO monad until it has finished, it is probably safe.
The unsafety is only visible using the other lazy I/O operations,
principally hGetContents.

> Evaluation never leaves the IO monad until
> termination. getContents is more strange. However, you can just define
> its semantics to yield a random string. When you are not 
> careful you may certainly get something nearly random ;-)

So... you agree that getContents in its current form should really be
called unsafeGetContents?  Unless perhaps we redefine its semantics to
either (a) yield a random string or (b) eagerly slurp the entire stream
contents?

Cheers,
	Simon