[Haskell-cafe] Being impure within a 'pure' function

[Eugene Kirpichov]

Yes. Use the ST ("State Thread") monad. Data.Array.ST, STRef etc.

2009/4/22 Daniel K. <anmeldemails at gmail.com>:
> Hello,
>
> imagine the following situation: You want to implement e.g. Dijkstra's
> algorithm to find a shortest path between nodes u and v in a graph. This
> algorithm relies heavily on mutating arrays, so the type signature would
> look something like
>
> getDistance :: Graph -> Node -> Node -> IO Int
>
> Not mutating the underlying arrays would probably result in poor
> performance. BUT: For a constant graph, the distance between two nodes stays
> the same all the time, so in fact getDistance should be a pure function!
> So here is my question: Is there a way to write functions in Haskell that do
> some IO internally, but that are guaranteed to be side-effect free? Of
> course one would have to make sure that the array that is mutated inside
> getDistance must not be accessible from outside the function.
>
> Is that possible? If not, wouldn't that be desirable? If not, why not?
>
> Thanks
>
>   Daniel
>
>
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-- 
Eugene Kirpichov
Web IR developer, market.yandex.ru