[Haskell] Real life examples

[Ben Rudiak-Gould]

John Meacham wrote:

 >With my mdo proposal, and I think all proposals brought forth, the
 >module system behaves identically to how it normally does for
 >namespace control. [...] modules do not change code at all, they
 >are pure syntantic sugar for deciding what names you can see.

I'm not sure I understand your mdo proposal correctly then. A lot of 
this debate has been over what should happen when a module has a 
top-level action like

    x <- putStrLn "hello"

Everyone agrees that "hello" should be printed at most once, and that if 
the value of x is ever demanded, it should be printed exactly once. But 
there's disagreement on everything else. What if I import the module 
containing the above declaration, but it can be proven statically that 
the value of x will never be demanded? What if it can't be proven 
statically, but it happens to be true on a particular run? If "hello" is 
printed even when x's value is not demanded, then import does more than 
bring names into scope: it also sometimes adds things to the top-level 
mdo. If "hello" is printed only when x's value is demanded, then import 
is okay but the <- construct is unsafe (though safer than unsafePerformIO).

This kind of thing turned a lot of people off to the idea of top-level 
initialization actions. George Russell's proposal is appealing because 
it neatly avoids such problems.

-- Ben