[Haskell-cafe] Haskell-Cafe Digest, Vol 93, Issue 58

[Alexander Solla]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 4:45 PM, M.C.A. (Marco) Devillers <
marco.devillers at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> The urge to do I/O at all the wrong places is a born instinct.
>
>
> The original poster was well aware how to factor out IO out of his program,
> as made apparent by his initial comment: "An option I suppose would be to
> read the dictionary at the top level, and then pass it all the way down to
> the analysis routine that uses it, but that exposes the details of how the
> analysis is done, and couples the top and bottom levels of the previously
> modular functions."
>
> His original argument was a genuine observation that IO sometimes seems to
> be adverse to the loose coupling of modules. Dissing that argument away as:
> "you are doing IO at the wrong place," doesn't convince me the least.
>
>
There are ways to decouple IO from pure code.  I often have a "Main"
datatype which constructs a "pure context" (based on command line arguments,
files and their contents, etc) which is then "interpreted" by pure code.  In
other words, this is a pure control structure, which is computed by IO
(sometimes in an applicative style, sometimes in a monadic one), and then
passed into the pure world for processing.  This can be as tightly or
loosely coupled as we like, assuming we understand that if a value is even
partially based on the results of an IO computation, then IO is going to
drive the computation of that value.  There's no way around that.
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