[Haskell-cafe] How to write elegant Haskell programms?

[John Hughes]

>
>I think that whole "program flow" thing is something you get used to.  In
>  
>
>>true, pure functional programming (i.e. Haskell) "program flow" is a
>>meaningless term, basically.  Haskell is a declarative language, not an
>>imperative one.  You have to learn to give up that control and trust the
>>runtime to Do The Right Thing.  (In this regard it's similar to logic
>>programming languages.)
>>
>>    
>>
>
>I think it's important/useful to point out that "program flow" in a pure
>functional language is really a matter of data dependency. The compiler is
>only free to arbitrarily order computations if there are no data
>dependencies. Furthermore, monads are not special in any way (they are after
>all just a useful set of combinators; e.g.
>http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monads-and.html);
>they only wind up sequencing computations because they set up a data
>dependency between the two arguments of the bind operator.
>
>-Jeff
>
And actually they don't even do that, always. A useful example in 
practice: then Gen monad in QuickCheck does *not* necessarily set up any 
data dependencies, so do in the Gen monad does not force sequencing. The 
fact that it's non-strict is what enables us to generate infinite random 
data-structures with it.

John Hughes