[Haskell-cafe] Re: Yet another IO initializer: Effectful declarations and an ACIO monad

[George Russell]

Ian Stark wrote (snipped):
 > Way back in this thread, Koen Claessen mentioned the idea of a commutative
 > version of the IO monad for handling things with identity.  That doesn't quite
 > do it, but I have a refinement that might.  The thing is to focus on IO
 > computations that are:
 >
 >  a) central -- their effect commutes with every other IO action
 >  b) affine  -- their effect is not directly observable, and can be discarded.

Unfortunately I have a number of examples where I use global variables with
initialisation actions which cannot conceivably be proven to be central & affine
by the compiler.  For example, where I want to call up an external program (such
as wish) which I will later use for doing graphics.

The Haskell libraries would run into a similar problem when they tried to
open stdin/stdout/stderr.  Or indeed when they tried to implement RandomGen,
which I presume is going to want to get at the system clock to seed the
random number generator.

My guess is that if we were to have top-level <- actions where the actions were
restricted to those certified to be ACIO, it would not be very long before GHC
would implement an unsafeForceACIO function ...