[Haskell-cafe] Re: philosophy of Haskell

[Ertugrul Soeylemez]

"Patai Gergely" <patai_gergely at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> > No.  As you say the world1 value is immutable, but that's not
> > contradictory.  If between 'getLine' and 'print' something was done
> > by a concurrent thread, then that change to the world is captured by
> > 'print'.
>
> Well, that's technically true, but it basically amounts to saying that
> the 'model' of IO is itself. If I see 'print x', I don't really think
> of an action that performs arbitrary side effects and prints x in the
> process (unless some error prevents even that). Some notion of
> compositionality is required, which would allow me to state how 'print
> x' contributes to the changes of the world in a way that doesn't
> depend on any context. Actions in the state monad are composable in
> that sense, while the same doesn't apply to the IO monad when
> explained in terms of state passing.

Why not?

I don't see any problems here.  Note that the mental model of IO I
presented is not explicit state passing, but a state /monad/.  I'm
proposing the hypothetical existence of a function like this:

  advanceEverything :: Universe -> Universe

such that:

  print x =
    \world0 ->
    doTheActualPrinting x (advanceEverything world0)

After all 'print' is not constrained to the effect of printing
something.  All sorts of things can happen while printing, including
even network communication, when stdout is not a terminal.  In IO
everything can happen everywhere.

The advanceEverything function could just as well be used by (>>=)
instead of the individual IO computations.


Greets,
Ertugrul


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