[Haskell-cafe] Alternative name for return

[Jerzy Karczmarczuk]

Richard A. O'Keefe :
> Haskell has*trained*  my intuition to
> see 'putStrLn "Hi"' as a pure value; it's not the thing itself that has effects,
> but its interpretation by an outer engine, just as my magnetic card key has by
> itself no power to open doors, but the magnetic reader that looks at the card
> _does_.
I am the last here who would quarrel with Richard O'K., but I firmly 
believe that such reasoning is a Pandora box.

The King, the government, the Pope, etc. have no power, only the 
interpretation of their decrees by "outer agents" _does_ things.

Saying that the Justice of the country X is lousy is a harmful abuse. 
Our Justice is good, only its interpretation by some incompetent 
traitors gave rise to all these calamitous events.

You see what I mean?... Are we going to switch now to the Mind-Body dilemma?

==

BTW. Saying that "5" is a pure value means only that the whole of the 
underlying system treats it as such. The object "5" couldn't care less. 
It even doesn't know that in some programming language it is equivalent 
to an action which puts it on the evaluation stack.

That's why for me the "purity" (while teaching I try to avoid this word) 
means simply that whatever you do with the object, it won't fire a 
"magic" process. As Richard, I do not claim that this is "right", but it 
surely facilitated my teaching of Haskell. My students have already more 
than enough of my /philosophie de pacotille/...

Jerzy Karczmarczuk

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