[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Top Level <-

[Adrian Hey]

Jonathan Cast wrote:
> This has been answered repeatedly, at least implicitly.  Unless you
> insist that getWhatever should live in the IO monad and have no
> functional arguments (why?), there is no reason why this should be
> impossible.
> 
>> What's more, there seems to be no good *semantic* reason why this should
>> not be possible. The only objections seem dogmatic to me.
> 
> I haven't seen you give a non-dogmatic reason for wanting global
> variables yet, either.

You consider real examples from real *standard* libs that we're all 
using (and presumably not written by clueless hackers such as myself)
to be dogmatic? I would call that pragmatic myself. These are the
standard libs after all. Shouldn't we expect them to be the perfect
examples of how to do things rite?

>> But even if someone does produce an entirely unsafePerformIO hack
>> free set of standard libs, I have to ask why jump through all these
>> hoops?
> 
> To improve the APIs available?

There's nothing wrong with the APIs as they are as far as I am
concerned. It's their implemenation that's the problem.

>  You're advocating an extension to a
> *purely functional programming language*.

So? What's being proposed doesn't compromise referential transparency
(at least no more that the IO monad already does, as some might argue).

>> There's no semantic difficulty with the proposed language
>> extension,
> 
> Although I've noticed it's grossly under-powered compared to what's
> needed to implement stdin the way you want to.

Can't recall expressing any opinion about how stdin should be
implemented so I don't know what your on about here.

Regards
--
Adrian Hey