Steve Schafer wrote:
"basically everything I write programs for is mainly about I/O..."
It's funny how people always seem to think that, but if you look at what they're really doing, I/O is usually the least of their worries. Programming GUIs is about the only reasonably common I/O-related task that has any sort of complexity. Most everything else is reading or writing streams of bytes; the hard part is what happens between the reading and the writing.
Indeed, I replied "if all you want to do is run some algorithm over some data, you can write a thin layer to do the I/O, and then write the rest in pure code". And everybody was like "er, I don't understand what distinction you think you're making..." Obviously, what I meant is that one can write main = do stuff <- readFile "source.txt" writeFile "source.exe" $ compile stuff compile = ... I guess because in most normal programming languages you can do I/O anywhere you damn like, it doesn't occur to most programmers that it's possible to make a seperation. (Most seem to realise that, e.g., mixing business logic with GUI code is a Bad Thing though...) I saw a quote somewhere round here that went like this: "Haskell isn't really suited to heavily I/O-oriented programs." "What, you mean like darcs?" "...oh yeah." ;-)