[Haskell-cafe] Monad explanation

[Sittampalam, Ganesh]

> My bad, I restate:  a value cannot be both static and dynamic.  Or an
> object and a morphism.  Or an element and a function.  Sure, you can
> treat a morphism as an object, but only by moving to a higher (or
> different) level of abstraction.  That doesn't erase the difference
> between object and morphism.  If you do erase that difference you end
> up with mush.  getChar /looks/ like an object, but semantically it
> must be a morphism.  But it can't be a function, since it is
> non-deterministic.   So actually the logical contradiction comes from
> the nature of the beast.        
> 
> Another reason it's confusing to newcomers:  it's typed as "IO Char",
> which looks like a type constructor.  One would expect getChar to
> yield a value of type IO Char, no?  But it delivers a Char instead. 
> This is way confusing.  So I take "type IO foo" to mean "type foo,
> after a side effect".  In a sense "getChar :: IO Char" isn't even a
> true type signature.     

It does yield a value of type IO Char, which it also happens that you
can ask the Haskell runtime to interpret by combining it with other
IO values using >>= and invoking it from the top-level.
*When interpreted in this way* it delivers a Char, but that's precisely
the point at which we move to the different level of abstraction you
mention above.

Ganesh

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