Right, I read more about it and found this out. The 'main' function is apparently magical at runtime and allows you to break the with pure functionality just once but since it can call other functions this allows for useful programs to be written.
----- Original Message ----
From: Jules Bean
Thanks, that was helpful. I didn't realize that there were pure functional monads.
Actually, it's stronger than that. All monads are pure functional, even IO. Haskell is an entirely 100% pure functional language[*]. The IO monad allows you to build up, in a pure, referentially transparent way, an object call an 'IO action' which you have no way of actually executing, per se. Fortunately, this isn't as useless as it sounds since the runtime system contains the support to "actually run" the special IO action called 'main', which bootstraps the whole setup. Jules [*] non-functions like unsafePerformIO are not technically part of the haskell language! ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss an email again! Yahoo! Toolbar alerts you the instant new Mail arrives. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/