[Haskell-cafe] The values of infinite lists

[Claus Reinke]

> One issue here is that I think there is often not enough clarity about the 
> two different kinds of functional activity going on ie:
> 1) The actual construction of the monadic action using >>= and return (and 
> fail)
> 2) The functional interpretation of the action thus constructed

I agree that this distinction is important, and the latter stage is where the
context-sensitivity of i/o comes in - unlike all other uses of monads in Haskell,
i/o actions are interpreted by an external entity (see my other email). 
 
> My current understanding of this is that lazy evaluation allows you to 
> consider that these two different activities really do happen in the 
> sequence above, the lazyness just acting as a helpful optimization that 
> avoids wasting time constructing bits of action that are never going to get 
> executed (ie lazyness pushes the future back into the present).

(the picture is slightly less simple, as 1/2 are repeated, hence construction
and interpretation are interleaved, and later construction may depend on
the results of earlier interpretation, but I assume you know that;)

you don't actually need lazyness. you don't even need >>= to be non-strict
in its second parameter, because that second parameter will be a continuation
function, and even strict functional languages tend not to evaluate under
lambdas (so wrapping expressions in extra lambdas or eta-extending functions
to make their outer lambda explicit is a standard technique to delay evaluation
in those languages).

the standard papers do not make this very clear, but neither lazyness nor
static typing are needed to add a monadic i/o system to a purely functional
language (it took me a while to figure that out when I had to decide how to
add an i/o system to a purely functional language without either feature..).

cheers,
claus