IO-System

David Sabel dsabel@stud.uni-frankfurt.de
Tue, 17 Sep 2002 03:06:57 +0200


> The runtime system mostly has no concept of IO vs. non-IO evaluation.
> The IO monad is implemented as the following type:
>
>   newtype IO a = IO (State# RealWorld ->
>    (# State# RealWorld, a #)
>
> which means that an IO action is simply a function from the world state
> to a pair of a new world state and a value.  In other words, it's a
> straightfoward state monad, except that we use some optimised
> representations to eliminate some of the overhead of passing the state
> around.
>
> Cheers,
> Simon

Ok so far, but when is the IO action performed?

Look at this small programm:

    module Main(main) where

    main = echoTwice

    echo = getChar >>= putChar

    echoTwice = echo >> echo

while executing: the program reads first two chararcters and then it writes
the characters, but
in my opinion it would be right to read one character, then write one
characater, then read, then write.
What's the reason for it?

----------------------------------
David Sabel
JWGU Frankfurt