[Haskell-cafe] background question about IO monad

Uwe Hollerbach uhollerbach at gmail.com
Wed Feb 6 23:13:02 EST 2008


Well, you may well be right! Just think of me as a planarian at the opera... :-)

On 2/6/08, Jonathan Cast <jonathanccast at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On 6 Feb 2008, at 7:30 PM, Uwe Hollerbach wrote:
>
> > Hi, all, thanks for the responses. I understand the distinction
> > between pure functions and impure functions/procedures/IO actions,
>
> Um, I'm not sure of that, given what you go on to say.
>
> > it
> > just felt to me in the samples that I quoted that I was in fact
> > starting from basically the starting point,
>
> Not really.  The key difference to understand is that between
> difference between getCurrentTime and toUTCTime 42.  These are your
> `starting points' --- the rest is just pure code.
>
> > eventually getting to the
> > same endpoint (or at least a pair of endpoints that are not easily
> > distinguished from each other by looking just at code), and inbetween
>
> Well, the in-between paths are pure (or can be) either way.  It's the
> starting point that needs liftIO or not.
>
> > one path was going through liftIO and the other not. But I guess it
> > comes down to the fact that, since I'm in a REPL, I'm wallowing in
> > impurity all the time (or something like that :-) )
>
> jcc
>
>


More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list