[Haskell] Re: ST/STRef vs. IO/IORef

[Axel Simon]

On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 10:58 +0200, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 4. August 2005 10:21 schrieb Axel Simon:
> > [...]
> 
> > Nowadays, you can use one of the MonadState monad
> 
> State transformer monads like State and StateT can be implemented without 
> using special language features.  So there was always the opportunity to 
> implement something like State or StateT.  So, in a way, we always could use 
> the MonadState monads.  If ST could be replaced by MonadState monads, ST had 
> never been included in the libraries, I suppose.

Well, MonadState needs multi-parameter type classes, and hence, require
much more than ST. 

> > if you want lazy computation (on top of which you can implement state read
> > and write accesses similar to IORefs) or IO-enabled computation (if you use
> > MonadState.StateT and embed an IO monad at the core).
> 
> The point is that the MonadState monads don't give you update-in-place.  
> Update-in-place is exactly the reason why ST is there.

Ok, granted. In particular I take your point about array accesses.
However, I am not quite convinced that using ST has any advantages over
using IO directly. Of course, one could claim that programmers wants to
protect themselves from themselves by disallowing arbitrary IO. But if
that is the only "advantage" then I'd rather go for the flexibility to
use arbitrary IO later on without having to rewrite my whole program.

Thanks for you comment,
Axel.