[Haskell-cafe] Language support for imperative code. Was: Re: monad subexpressions

[Brian Hulley]

Martin Percossi wrote:
> Brian Hulley wrote:
>
>> hidden away in the definition of their API function to create a 
>> label, is a call to (ref 0) !!!! ;-) The equivalent implementation in 
>> Haskell would completely destroy all hope of using this in a pure 
>> context and force all use of the API into the IO monad.
>
> Really? I would have thought this is a job for the ST monad, in which 
> case the API can be wrapped up in a runST or similar; no need for 
> leaking IO monads.
>
> Or am I missing something?

Well I agree you're right on this particular use of a Ref, since their 
program is only dealing with a mapping from input to output so once 
they're finished using the data structure there is no longer any need 
for the ref and so the result can be returned to the rest of the program.

However there are 2 problems with this approach in general afaics:

1) All code that uses this data structure ie that participates in the 
implementation of the transformations by using the API functions will 
have to be in a monad (ST or IO, it really doesn't matter in terms of 
all the perceived burdensomeness of do notation relative to normal 
applicative code).

2) The example doesn't transfer to an interactive situation, where we 
would need to keep the data structure around and use it forever - 
because we would be forever trapped inside the ST monad otherwise we'd 
lose that particular STRef which we were hoping to use to efficiently 
update the output in the face of a delta in the input.



Corey -
I found this page helpful to get an understanding of the value 
restriction in ML:

http://www.smlnj.org/doc/Conversion/types.html

The restriction was proposed by Andrew Wright in 1995:

"Simple Imperative Polymorphism" by Wright
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/wright95simple.html

Some other related papers are:

"The Type and effect discipline" by Talpin and Jouvelot 1992
"Standard ML-NJ weak polymorphism and imperative constructs" by Hoang, 
Mitchell, and Viswanathan
"Weak polymorphism can be sound" by Greiner 1993

and more recently (2003)

"Relaxing the value restriction" by Garrigue
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/garrigue03relaxing.html

(Note that even now there is still no real solution to it.)


Best regards, Brian.