On Friday 11 January 2002 19:39, Jan-Willem Maessen wrote:
The ST monad provides safer encapsulation of mutable references. We can prove that references which escape a particular instance of ST are never side effected. See the paper "Lazy Functional State Threads":
http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~jl/Papers/stateThreads.ps
This allows us to construct functions which are certain to present a functional face to the world, but use mutation internally. In this respect, ST is actually "better" than IO, albeit less well-supported.
So would writing for instance a GUI library, with abstract interfaces using
ST be a good idea?
Thanks,
--
Eray Ozkural (exa)