[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Top Level <-

[Jonathan Cast]

On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 23:00 +0100, Lennart Augustsson wrote:
> IMO, there's no justification for having IORefs etc in the IO monad.
> They should be in a separate monad.  There could then be an operation
> to lift that monad to the IO monad, if you so wish.
> But wait, we already have that, it's the ST monad!  (So there is no
> justification.)

Right.  We'd have ST (which has the advantage that, if you don't have
any free variables of STRef type, your code can be used in a pure
context), together with a monad homomorphism

  stToProgram :: ST RealWorld alpha -> Program alpha

We'd also have IO (stripped of IORef, Random, Unique, and other such
irrelevant ugliness), together with a monad homomorphism

  ioToProgram :: IO alpha -> Program alpha

Then, the top-level type rule would be

  Main.main :: Program ()

We'd flame people for using the Program monad outside of the Main module
or monad homomorphisms like ioToProgram or stToProgram.  Then, using the
functional programming language research of the last 20 years instead of
ignoring it for historical reasons, we'd get a free monad homomorphism

  ioAndStToProgram :: Coproduct IO (ST RealWorld) alpha -> Program alpha

which would let you use both in the same program.

It doesn't dispense with the need for top-level Program (yet), but it's
a step in the right direction.

jcc