[Haskell-cafe] I/O without monads, using an event loop

Robin Green greenrd at greenrd.org
Fri May 30 10:09:37 EDT 2008


I have been thinking about to what extent you could cleanly do I/O
without explicit use of the I/O monad, and without uniqueness types
(which are the main alternative to monads in pure functional
programming, and are used in the Concurrent Clean programming language).

Suppose you have a main event handler function, like this:

eventMain :: (Event, SystemState AppState) -> (Command, SystemState
AppState)

This function could be called over and over in an event loop, until an
EndProgram command was received, and the event loop would itself do all
the actual I/O (the SystemStates are only in-memory representations of
some part of the system state, plus the application's own state). Things
like disk I/O could be done with commands which generate events when
complete. Interprocess communication could be done in the same way.

Then eventMain, and everything called by it, would be
referentially-transparent, and yet non-monadic. You could of course
build higher-level stuff on top of that.

On the other hand, it's quite stateful, because anything you need to
remember between events need to be recorded, either in the SystemState
or externally (e.g. in a file). I suppose this is the most important
disadvantage?

Is there any published work or code using this approach, or something
like it, in a pure functional language? I'm primarily interested in
embedded system and desktop UIs, rather than say web-based systems,
although both would be interesting.

-- 
Robin


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