[Haskell-cafe] Re: How to do this in FP way?

[Thomas Davie]

On 16 Jun 2008, at 18:28, Achim Schneider wrote:

> Thomas Davie <tom.davie at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>
>>> One half of all Haskell coders will tell you that mutable state
>>> isn't a
>>> good starting point to learn Haskell, the other half will tell you
>>> the same because they want to be cool kids, too.
>>
>> And the one left over will point out that he asked how to do this
>> the FP way, not the imperative way?
>>
> There's no difference, as you can't do time-accounting non-strict and
> still expect it to give meaningful results: I'm merely trying to be
> helpful. None of the other solutions allow for the IO Monad.

Firstly, I'd phrase that differently -- the IO Monad doesn't allow for  
the other solutions -- the other solutions are the truly functional  
ones.  Secondly, I'm curious as to why you think that the two are  
incompatible, are you saying that for any meaningful kind of  
computation we need to resort to IORefs?  I'd strongly contest that  
idea.

Bob