GUI Library Task Force

Matt Harden matth@mindspring.com
Tue, 25 Sep 2001 23:39:08 -0500


"Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" wrote:

> * I am not a big fan of introducing an extra monad (`GUI' in
>   this case).  It can easily become a pain in programs that
>   do a lot of "normal" IO as you have to lift all IO
>   functions to GUI.

Shouldn't GUI be a typeclass (as a subclass of Monad), with IO being an
instance of it?  This gives the following benefits:

	o  "Pure" GUI functions can reflect this in their type.
		i.e. (GUI g) => g ()
	o  IO functions can use GUI features directly without lifting.
	o  "Pure" GUI functions are implicitly usable in the IO monad
		They "are" IO functions.

Regards,
Matt