[Haskell-cafe] Lazy Evaluation in Monads

[Anthony Cowley]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Scott Lawrence <bytbox at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was under the impression that operations performed in monads (in this
> case, the IO monad) were lazy. (Certainly, every time I make the
> opposite assumption, my code fails :P .) Which doesn't explain why the
> following code fails to terminate:
>
>  iRecurse :: (Num a) => IO a
>  iRecurse = do
>    recurse <- iRecurse
>    return 1
>
>  main = (putStrLn . show) =<< iRecurse
>
> Any pointers to a good explanation of when the IO monad is lazy?

import System.IO.Unsafe

iRecurse :: (Num a) => IO a
iRecurse = do
  recurse <- unsafeInterleaveIO iRecurse
  return 1

More interesting variations of this leave you with questions of
whether or not the missles were launched, or, worse yet, was data
actually read from the file handle?

Anthony