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

[Ben Franksen]

I prefer to think about IO as an abstract data type of atomic "actions"
i.e. the IO primitives (which we can extend via the FFI). The "run time
system" to me is a black box that "executes" these actions. A Haskell
program combines abstract IO primitives into a larger and more complex
action using IO's bind and return, and it does so in a purely functional
way. Evaluation order is completely irrelevant to this, because what
matters is the result, not how we arrive at it. The bind operator
instructs the run-time system to execute its left hand side, resulting
in a value to be passed to the right hand side, which is then evaluated
(in a purely functional way) to yield the next action etc.

There is nothing mysterious about this IMO. If you have a working model
for each of the IO primitives, this gives you a working model of what a
complete Haskell program does.

Cheers
Ben