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

[Roberto Zunino]

Robin Green wrote:
> 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

Here's a way to see I/O as a pure functional data structure. To keep
things simple, we model only Char I/O:

data Program
  = Quit
  | Output Char Program
  | Input (Char -> Program)
  -- ... add here other I/O primitives if you want

-- Example:
cat :: Program
cat = Input (\c -> Output c cat)

-- Trivial mapping into the IO monad
runProgram :: Program -> IO ()
runProgram Quit         = return ()
runProgram (Output c p) = putChar c >> runProgram p
runProgram (Input k)    = getChar >>= runProgram . k

Another approach could be to use lazy I/O, à la interact. However, I am
uncomfortable with lazy I/O.

See also IOSpec, a nice functional model of the IO monad:

  http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~wss/repos/IOSpec/

Regards,
Zun.