How can I make a counter without Monad?

15 Mar 2005

      Greetings,

In a program, I want to give a unique name to some structures.

As it is the only imperative  thing I need, I don't want to use a monad.

I have played with two solutions and have some questions :

* unsafePerformIO :
I create a counter :

counter :: IORef Int
counter = unsafePerformIO (newIORef 0)
{-# NOINLINE counter #-}

and a function to give a unique  name:
newNode a = unsafePerformIO $
	                     do
		            i <- readIORef counter
                                writeIORef counter (i+1)
	                      return (i,a)

{-# NOINLINE newNode #-}

I now want to write a function :
foo a =
    let n = newNode a in
	(n,n)

How can I make sure ghc won't reduce it to

foo a = (newNode a, newNode a) ?

* linear implicit parameters

instance Splittable Int where
   split n = (2*n,2*n+1)

But I have a problem : the counter value increases exponentially. (I 
can only count up to 32 elements...)

Is there another way to split Int?

Are there other ways to implement a counter in Haskell?

Thanks for your help,
Best regards,

Nicolas Oury