[Haskell-cafe] one-way monads

[Lauri Alanko]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 07:54:33AM +0200, Zsolt SZALAI wrote:
> Here comes IO and one-way monads, where the internal state can not be
> extacted, and seems, that the internal data is global to the program.
> Hows that could be? Is it just because main::IO() or because the
> implementation of IO uses external C functions and there are no
> internal state in the monad itself at all?

There's nothing magical about the IO monad as a concept. It is true
that it is handled specially by the library and the compiler, but this
is just for performance reasons.

IO _could_ well be an ordinary datatype:

data IO a where
  Return :: a -> IO a
  Bind :: IO a -> (a -> IO b) -> IO b
  OpenFile :: FilePath -> IOMode -> IO Handle
  HPutChar :: Handle -> Char -> IO ()
  HGetChar :: Handle -> IO Char
  HClose :: Handle -> IO ()
  -- etc.

If it were implemented like this, then the only magic would be in the
runtime, which would take the IO value returned by the main function
and somehow execute it. But if the implementation of IO were like
this, and the datatype were exposed, then we could perfectly well
write a userlevel "sandboxing" function:

runVirtual :: IO a -> VirtualWorld -> (a, VirtualWorld)

Where "VirtualWorld" would be a sandbox that contains all the state
that IO operations can access: at least a filesystem, maybe something
else too. This would probably count as "extraction".

As it happens, the IO monad is usually not implemented this way, but
more directly. Performance is here more important than transparency...


Lauri