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

[Till Mossakowski]

Remi Turk wrote:
> MonadState needs multi-parameter type classes, State and StateT
> don't. And ST needs rank-2 types (or at least one rank-2
> constant) and, to be implemented _efficiently_, also needs
> something like unsafePerformIO (or even lower-level unsafe
> mutable state primitives).

> I think one could call the ST monad a safe yet still efficient
> variant of unsafePerformIO + IORef's + IOArray's.

No, the point of ST is that it is safe (as opposed to unsafePerformIO),
but still has the advantages of being both efficient and allowing
purely functional encapsulation via runST (as oppesed to IORefs
and IOArrays). The only price is that you need rank-2 polymorphism
and new language primitives for creating, reading and writing
references. But using these primitives is much better than using
unsafePerformIO - the latter entails a lot of harmful things.

-- 
Till Mossakowski               Phone +49-421-218-4683
Dept. of Computer Science      Fax +49-421-218-3054
University of Bremen           till at tzi.de
P.O.Box 330440, D-28334 Bremen http://www.tzi.de/~till