[Haskell-cafe] Functions with side-effects?

[Wolfgang Jeltsch]

Am Mittwoch, 21. Dezember 2005 19:02 schrieben Sie:
> [...]

> You (or, rather the processor) don't execute instructions to write "Hello"
> in same way as, say, adding 2 and 2.

Exactly!

> Rather, you add writing this string to a "to do" list and wait for a driver
> to respond to an interrupt, pick up the request(s), and carry it (them) out
> when control passes back the kernel. 

I don't completely understand what you mean but I think it goes into the right 
direction.  We can illustrate the process of executing a Haskell program as 
follows.

We have a "evaluation machine" and a "execution machine".  The former 
evaluates expressions, the latter executes I/O actions.  When the program is 
started, the execution machine wants to execute the actions from the "main to 
do list".  In order to be able to do so, it asks the evaluation machine to 
start evaluating main.  For each entry on the to do list, main is evaluated 
as far as it's necessary to provide the execution machine with the entry.  Of 
course, evaluating main may result in evaluating other expressions.

The point is that the evaluation machine does never execute any I/O actions 
while the execution machine is unable to do any evaluation but needs to be 
feeded by the evaluation machine.

Best wishes,
Wolfgang