Re: [Haskell-cafe] On the purity of Haskell

On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Ketil Malde wrote:

Chris Smith writes:

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I wonder: can writing to memory be called a “computational effect”? If yes, then every computation is impure.

I wonder if not the important bit is that pure computations are unaffected by other computations (and not whether they can affect other computations). Many pure computations have side effects (increases temperature, modifies hardware registers and memory, etc), but their effect can only be observed in IO.

(E.g. Debug.Trace.trace provides a non-IO interface by use of unsafePerformIO which is often considered cheating, but in this view it really is pure.)

The point of purity (and related concepts) is to have useful tools for working with and reasoning about your code. Lambda calculi can be seen as the prototypical functional languages, and the standard ones have the following nice property: The only difference between reduction strategies is termination. Non-strict strategies will terminate for more expressions than strict ones, but that is the only difference. This property is often taken to be the nub of what it means to be a pure functional language. If the language is an extension of the lambda calculus that preserves this property, then it is a pure functional language. Haskell with the 'unsafe' stuff removed is such a language by this definition, and most GHC additions are too, depending on how you want to argue. It is even true with respect to the output of programs, but not when you're using Debug.Trace, because: flip (+) ("foo" `trace` 1) ("bar" `trace` 1) will print different things with different evaluation orders. A similar property is referential transparency, which allows you to factor your program however you want without changing its denotation. So: (\x -> x + x) e is the same as: e + e This actually fails for strict evaluation strategies unless you relax it to be 'same denotation up to bottoms' or some such. But not having to worry about whether you're changing the definedness of your programs by factoring/inlining is actually a useful property that strict languages lack. Also, the embedded IO language does not have this property. do x <- m ; f x x is different from do x <- m ; y <- m ; f x y and so on. This is why you shouldn't write your whole program with IO functions; it lacks nice properties for working with your code. But the embedded IO language lacking this property should not be confused with Haskell lacking this property. Anyhow, here's my point: these properties can be grounded in useful features of the language. However, for the vast majority of people, being able to factor their code differently and have it appear exactly the same to someone with a memory sniffer isn't useful. And unless you're doing serious crypto or something, there is no correct amount of heat for a program to produce. So if we're wondering about whether we should define purity or referential transparency to incorporate these things, the answer is an easy, "no." We throw out the possibility that 'e + e' may do more work than '(\x -> x + x) e' for the same reason (indeed, we often want to factor it so that it performs better, while still being confident that it is in some sense the same program, despite the fact that performing better might by some definitions mean that it isn't the same program). But the stuff that shows up on stdout/stderr typically is something we care about, so it's sensible to include that. If you don't care what happens there, go ahead and use Debug.Trace. It's pure/referentially transparent modulo stuff you don't care about. -- Dan