[Haskell] threading mutable state through callbacks

[Adrian Hey]

On Tuesday 12 Oct 2004 10:19 pm, Jules Bean wrote:
> It does matter for general IO operations at the top level.

All I'm aiming for is to disambiguate programs (avoid the use of
unsafePerformIO) in such a way that the programmer at least stands a
reasonable chance of getting it right without compiler optimisations
screwing things up.

> Order
> doesn't matter in in any essential way for the particular case of
> newIORef, no.

Or for a great many other IO operations that a programmer may wish
to use, though certainly not all that he could define (if sufficiently
malicious :-) 

> Now it's my turn not to understand you. What is a "thing with identity"?

Basically I mean some packet of state, where is makes a difference
which particular packet of state is referenced.

So an IORef is a reference to a "thing with identity".
Of course this is why the type of newIORef is..

newIORef :: a -> IO (IORef a)

not simply..

newIORef :: a -> IORef a

Any new "thing with identity" has be constructed via something like..

newThing :: IO Thing

..which makes it difficult to create such things at the top level, even
though (as Simon M pointed out) there's no problem with actually using
such things at the top level (assuming we had some magic that enabled
their creation).

Regards
--
Adrian Hey