[Haskell-cafe] Monadic vs "pure" style (was: pros and cons of sta tic typing and side effects)

[Thomas Davie]

On Aug 30, 2005, at 12:13 PM, Bayley, Alistair wrote:

>> From: Duncan Coutts [mailto:duncan.coutts at worcester.oxford.ac.uk]
>>
>> This is often a misconception, that just because you find you need to
>> 'do' something in the middle of your algorithm, that you need
>> to convert it wholly to monadic style.
>>
>
> Yes. However, Wadler makes a convincing (at least to me) case that the
> monadic style is easier to extend. The code changes for the monadic  
> style
> appear to be more localised.
>
> Something else I noticed about my non-monadic code was the way I was
> threading state through functions. I was tempted to introduce a  
> State monad
> to make this easier to manage, but then I decided to try mutable  
> arrays
> instead, so that experiment was not attempted. So it might well  
> have been
> better in monadic style anyway, even with immutable arrays.
>
> I'm conscious that for most (?) monads, monadic code can be invoked  
> from
> non-monadic code. I'm only aware of the IO monad as a one-way trap. So
> changing code from pure to monadic doesn't necessarily involve  
> program-wide
> changes, unless the monad you're introducing happens to be IO. In  
> my array
> example, I introduced STArrays, but the main interface remained pure
> (non-monadic), which was my goal.
>
> I was also wondering what the disadvantages of monadic style are?  
> Are there
> compiler optimisations which are not possible with monadic code?

Both the advantage and the disadvantage is that you break lazy  
evaluation.  90% of the time lazyness is your friend and monadifying  
your code can break some nice features, but there is an occasional  
10% of the time when it's useful to break lazyness.

On a side note, whenever I find myself tempted to pass state around,  
I consider whether using CPS is better... It provides some method of  
ordering code, but doesn't break lazyness.

Just 2¢ from a relative newbie.

Bob
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20050830/ae4b8876/attachment-0001.htm