[Haskell-cafe] A tale of Project Euler

[Jan-Willem Maessen]

On Nov 29, 2007, at 6:19 PM, Stefan O'Rear wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 09:10:16PM +0000, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
>>> On Nov 29, 2007 6:43 PM, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I don't understand the ST monad.
>>>>
> ...[and ST uses language extensions Andrew doesn't understand.]
>
> (As far as ST goes, runST is unsafePerformIO renamed.  The only tricky
> bit is proving safety.)

To put it another way, runST is unsafePerformIO where somebody has  
already done the safety proof for you (so you know it's 100% safe).   
The "strange" extensions are simply a device to make the safety proof  
work.  Indeed, if you drop the extensions it can all be made to work  
(just say runST :: ST () a -> a) but you lose the safety proof and  
it's equivalent to unsafePerformIO.

-Jan

[The trick used in runST is one of my all-time favorite bits of type  
theory, and is what convinced me we wanted second-order types back  
before the first Haskell workshop.]