Does that mean there is no place to store state while running the interpreter and that I have to put the state elsewhere such as a file?  I was hoping to avoid that as I'm only prototyping at this stage and don't want to write a persistent layer just yet.

Thanks

-John

On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 11:51 AM, Thomas Davie <tom.davie@gmail.com> wrote:

On 8 Dec 2008, at 01:28, John Ky wrote:

Hi,

Is the following safe?

moo :: TVar Int
moo = unsafePerformIO $ newTVarIO 1

I'm interested in writing a stateful application, and I wanted to start with writing some IO functions that did stuff on some state and then test them over long periods of time in GHCi.

I was worried I might be depending on some guarantees that aren't actually there, like moo being discarded and recreated inbetween invocations of different functions.

Define safe... In this case though, I would guess it's not safe.  The compiler is free to call moo zero, one or many times depending on its evaluation strategy, and when it's demanded.  It's possible that your TVar will get created many times, and different values returned by the "constant" moo.

That sounds pretty unsafe to me.

Bob