[Haskell] Re: Lazy IO breaks purity
Ahn, Ki Yung
kyagrd at gmail.com
Sat Mar 14 04:41:23 EDT 2009
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
> I don't see any breaking of referential transparence in your code.
> Every time you do an IO operation the result is basically
> non-deterministic since you are talking to the outside world.
> You're assuming the IO has some kind of semantics that Haskell makes
> no promises about.
>
> I'm not saying that this isn't a problem, because it is.
> But it doesn't break referential transparency, it just makes the
> semantics of IO even more complicated.
+1
If we are in a situation where really have to take this seriously, we
already have a well-known standard trick for this kind of problem:
refine the monad! We can always define NonInterlavedIO monad for the
operations that does not use unsafeInterleaveIO. We have been doing this
all the time including the recent STM stuff.
> (I don't have a formal proof that unsafeInterleaveIO cannot break RT,
> but I've not seen an example where it does yet.)
>
> -- Lennart
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