[Haskell-cafe] Re: Can we come out of a monad?

[Ertugrul Soeylemez]

Martijn van Steenbergen <martijn at van.steenbergen.nl> wrote:

> On 8/2/10 7:09, Ertugrul Soeylemez wrote:
> > Given the definition of a Haskell function, Haskell is a pure
> > language.  The notion of a function in other languages is not:
> >
> >    int randomNumber();
> >
> > The result of this function is an integer.  You can't replace the
> > function call by its result without changing the meaning of the
> > program.
>
> I'm not sure this is fair. It's perfectly okay to replace a call
> "randomNumber()" by that method's *body* (1), which is what you argue
> is okay in Haskell.

This is not the same.  In Haskell you can replace the function call by
its /result/, not its body.  You can always do that.  But the result of
an IO-based random number generator is an IO computation, not a value.
It's not source code either, and it's not a function body.  It's a
computation, something abstract without a particular representation.

This is what referential transparency is about.  Not replacing function
calls by function bodies, but by their /results/.  In C you can't
replace

  putchar(33)

by

  33

because that changes the program.  Of course there are some exceptions
like many functions from math.h.  Unlike Haskell you don't write a
program by using a DSL (like the IO monad), but you encode it directly
as a series of statements and function calls.  C has no notion of a
"computation" the same way Haskell has.


Greets,
Ertugrul


-- 
nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex)
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