[Haskell] IORef sharing

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

This would be an excellent thread for the Haskell Cafe mailing list, haskell-cafe at haskell.org

However, it's becoming over-long for the main list

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Mailing_lists#Mailing_lists_in_detail

Thanks!

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: haskell-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:haskell-bounces at haskell.org] On
| Behalf Of Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH
| Sent: 28 October 2008 00:38
| To: Rodney D Price
| Cc: haskell at haskell.org
| Subject: Re: [Haskell] IORef sharing
|
| On 2008 Oct 27, at 20:25, Rodney D Price wrote:
| > Okay... However, when I use IO in a Haskell program,
| > the response is usually pretty snappy.  It's not as
| > if the Haskell runtime is hanging around, waiting for
| > some time in the future when it might be appropriate
| > to do IO.  It happens right now.  Yet the literature
| > gives the impression that the IO monad in particular
| > is a clever trick to preserve referential transparency
| > by gathering up all the IO actions, but not necessarily
| > actually *performing* them.  Then the Haskell runtime
| > holds its nose and *performs* them when necessary.0
|
| The *conceptual* model for the IO monad is that "main" returns a big
| IO action which is then evaluated by the Haskell runtime.
|
| As a practical matter, this usually behaves the same as if <- actually
| did evaluation.  (It doesn't.  It binds monadic expressions together,
| and is a convenient way to use the (>>=) operator.)  The one
| difference is its interaction with Haskell equations (a = b); since
| those are more or less macro definitions, assigning e.g. an expression
| of type IO String to such a "macro" will cause the expression to be
| substituted wherever the "macro" is used.
|
| IO is a very atypical monad, by the way.  Someone pointed you earlier
| to the "IO Inside" page, which describes the internal tricks that make
| IO work.  I prefer to think of IO actions as partially applied
| functions, with the missing argument being a "RealWorld" that is
| hidden inside the IO monad.  (think:  IO a = State RealWorld a.  This
| isn't quite correct because the state also has IORefs inside it.)
|
| --
| brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
| system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
| electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH
|
|
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