On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 01:45:52PM +0000, Dhaemon wrote:
Also, just for kicks, may I had this: I read the code of some haskell-made programs and was astonished. Yes! It was clean and all, but there were "do"s everywhere... Why use a function language if you use it as an imperative one?(i.e. most of the apps in http://haskell.org/practice.html)
Monadic code isn't synonymous with imperative code, and "do" only indicates that you're looking at monadic code. The Maybe monad is an example of a very useful, very non-imperative monad that can be used to cleanly write functional code. On the other hand, IO is always monadic, so perhaps you're looking at IO code. But I'd assert that even monadic IO code isn't quite the same as true "imperative" code. I'd probably say that the difference has to do with whether you create modifiable "variables". When you start doing that, whether you're in the ST monad or the IO monad, I think you're writing imperative-style code. But I think that that sort of usage is actually pretty uncommon. -- David Roundy