Dear GHCers, I ran face first into an assumption I had made on MVar operations (in Control.Concurrent); I had assumed there to be an atomic read (i.e. non-destructive read, as opposed to destructive consume/take). The following program illustrates what I had in mind. testAtomic :: IO () testAtomic = do var <- newMVar 0 putStrLn("Fork") forkIO (putMVar var 1 >> putStrLn "X") yield r1 <- readMVar var putStrLn("1") r2 <- takeMVar var putStrLn("2") r3 <- takeMVar var putStrLn("Result: " ++ show [r1,r2,r3]) If readMVar had been atomic, the result would be program termination with a result of [0,0,1] being output. However, readMVar simply combines takeMVar and putMVar, so the reading of r1 blocks after the takeMVar, because upon taking the MVar, the blocked thread wakes up, puts 1 in var and prints X. readMVar does not terminate for r1 (i.e. "1" is never printed). I have now implemented my variable as a pair of MVars, one of which serves as a lock on the other. Both for performance reasons and for deadlock analysis, I would really like an atomic read on MVars, though. Does it exist? If not, why not? Regards, Philip