[Haskell] Monads vs. continuations

[Gregory Woodhouse]

On Oct 31, 2005, at 9:37 AM, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:

> I don't know if this helps, but there's a straightforward way to  
> understand the IO monad in terms of continuation passing.
>
> You can think of a value of type IO a as being a CPS expression  
> with a hole in it; the hole is to be filled with a continuation  
> which expects a value of type a. The only way to fill the hole is  
> by using >>=, whose second argument is a continuation with another  
> (nested) hole in it. So effectively with >>= you build a CPS  
> expression from the outside in. The final continuation, which takes  
> () and aborts the program, is ultimately filled in by the runtime  
> system.
>
> This viewpoint doesn't work for other monads, since they always  
> provide some sort of destructuring operations on monadic values,  
> e.g. runState or the standard list deconstructors. But it works  
> fine for IO provided you ignore the existence of unsafePerformIO  
> and friends.
>
> -- Ben
>

No, that's definitely helpful. The analogy in the case of IO was  
obvious, but I had a sense that it was getting in the way of  
understanding what a monad is (i.e., by leading me to focus on the  
wrong issues).


===
Gregory Woodhouse
gregory.woodhouse at sbcglobal.net

"One must act on what has not yet happened."
--Lao Tzu