[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell serialisation, was: To yi or not to yi...

[Jon Cast]

On Thursday 21 June 2007, Tom Schrijvers wrote:
> That wouldn't make a difference. If, from the pure Haskell point of view
> we can't tell the difference between two expressions that denote the same
> function, then operations in the IO monad should not be able to do so
> either.

This doesn't make any sense to me.  IO is a non-determinism monad (among many 
other things).  That's already true --- randomIO is one example; 
Control.Exception.evaluate is another (and is already dependent on the 
particular compilation choices made).  I think of Haskell `values' as sets of 
legal representations anyway --- why shouldn't serialize be free to make a 
non-deterministic choice from among those sets, just like evaluate can make a 
non-deterministic choice from the set of exceptions an expression can throw?

Sincerely,
Jonathan Cast
Computer Programmer
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-core
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-emacs