[Haskell-cafe] Functions with side-effects?

Daniel Carrera daniel.carrera at zmsl.com
Wed Dec 21 10:24:29 EST 2005


Creighton Hogg wrote:
> x is a String, getLine has type IO String.  That's what I 
> was getting at in one of my last e-mails.

Hmm... let's see if I understand:

* getLine() has type IO String.
* The <- will "convert" an IO String to a plain String
* So if I do  x <- getLine() then x has the type String.

So, the <- effectively ammounts to an IO a -> a conversion.

In another email John Hughes said that one could think of "IO a" as a 
set of instructins for obtaining a. I guess that means that IO is a sort 
of imperative layer that helps the purely functional code interact with 
the outside world.

So I can have an IO bit (e.g. a do-block) that calls functions (which 
are purely functional code) but I can't have a function that executes 
any IO.

For example, it is not possible to write a function "my_read_file" that 
could work like this:

my_data = my_read_file("my_file.txt")

Correct? Otherwise this would be a function that is not referentially 
transparent.

Cheers,
Daniel.
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