G'day all. On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 10:06:51PM +0100, Alistair Bayley wrote:
OTOH, if you want to do anything useful with any language you have to learn to do IO (and simple IO is tackled early in most languages), and therefore you must deal with Monads. I often wish that Haskell books and tutorials would introduce IO earlier; it is often near the end, in the "advanced" topics (after you've been dazzled/saturated by the magic you can do with list functions and comprehensions, and how easy it is to create abstract datatypes, and write parsers, etc...).
Being fair for a moment, most Haskell books are intended as undergraduate computer science textbooks. There are many purposes of these introductory courses, but learning a particular programming language is not one of them. You can teach a lot of computer science without getting bogged down in the details of doing IO. Cheers, Andrew Bromage