[Haskell-cafe] Looking for feedback on my beginner's Haskell resource

[Joachim Durchholz]

Am 03.11.18 um 09:31 schrieb Brandon Allbery:
> Conceptualization of IO is difficult. One way to think about it is the 
> result of (main :: IO a) is a program sent to an impure runtime to 
> execute, with IO actions being compositions of instructions for the 
> runtime… but this breaks down as soon as you discover unsafePerformIO.

I have been thinking that that's just a conceptual accident: pure 
functions are enough to get all the useful effects (and most of the 
downsides) of global variables and mutable state, but pure functions 
cannot do IO. So unsafePerformIO is the one unsafe thing that was kept, 
other unsafe operations were either dropped or never made it into 
Haskell (remember that Haskell was designed by people who had been doing 
pure nonstrict languages for a decade or more).

> The closest that you'll get to the reality for GHC is that it pretty 
> much is a haven for impurity: that it forces all impure functions to 
> declare that in their types.
If Haskell is truly pure, then IO must be pure as well.
That's why I think that IO functions are just describing impure 
activity, not doing it.
I have not been able to verify whether this is actually true. Maybe IO 
is really a wart on Haskell's purity.
I'd hate it if it were, and I think the Haskell design group would have 
hated that as well. OTOH IO is one of three approaches, and it happened 
to be the one that became usable first, so it's not part of the initial 
design process. Then again I like to think that SPJ wouldn't even 
contemplate something impure - but I don't really know.