[Haskell-cafe] Alternative name for return

[Alberto G. Corona]

Fine reasoning.

Pure means incorruptible. It means that a pure result can be reused again
and again -like the gold or silver- while an impure result must be
re-created whenever it must be used. The metaphor is natural and I guess
that the use of pure (rather than referential transparent) is informal, but
as unavoidable as useful.  By the way, there are deeper considerations
here: To deal with pure values, like incorruptible stuff, like gold implies
lower information costs and that´s one of the reasons why they are valuable.

In this sense, we can give a positive meaning to unsafePerformIO and change
its name to  "purify" or  even "pasteurize" or "lyophilize" ;)






2013/8/7 Jerzy Karczmarczuk <jerzy.karczmarczuk at unicaen.fr>

>  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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>


-- 
Alberto.
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