[Haskell-cafe] Re: What are side effects in Haskell?

[Ertugrul Soeylemez]

Adrian Neumann <aneumann at inf.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

> Am 23.12.2008 um 15:16 schrieb Hans van Thiel:
>
> > I just saw somewhere that one of the purposes of monads is to
> > capture side effects. I understand what a side effect is in C, for
> > example.  Say you want to switch the contents of two variables. Then
> > you need a third temporary variable to store an intermediate
> > result. If this is global, then it will be changed by the operation.
>
> [...]
>
> However when you *do* want state you can simulate it with a monad.
> The IO Monad is a special case here, since its actions don't change
> your program, they change the "world" the program is running in
> (writing files etc.). getLine etc are functions when you think of them
> as taking a hidden parameter, the state of the world. So getChar would
> become
>
> getChar :: World -> (Char,World)
>
> but the world stays hidden inside the IO Monad.

Yes, I like this view, but you shouldn't say that the world is hidden
inside the IO monad, because you can easily use part of that state in
computations.  In my view, the IO monad is some notion of this:

  type IO = State World

The main difference between this and the real IO is that there is no
value for the (entire) world's state you could refer to, which
eliminates the need for 'get', 'put', and by introducing a 'main'
computation, also 'runState' becomes unnecessary.  In fact, this makes
the whole 'World' type unnecessary.  So IO is really just a theoretical
construct to make input/output consistent with referential transparency.

This is a very short version of what I have written in section 7 [1] of
my monads tutorial.

[1] http://ertes.de/articles/monads.html#section-7


Greets,
Ertugrul.


-- 
nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex)
http://blog.ertes.de/