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

[Brandon Allbery]

Go look at accursedUnutterablePerformIO (aka inlinePerformIO) sometime.
IO's just a barrier for impurity, and if you make the barrier leaky then
you can expect weird behavior at best.

On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 5:00 AM Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> wrote:

> 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.
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-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh
allbery.b at gmail.com
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