Re: [Haskell-cafe] Stupid newbie question of the day: why is newMVar in the IO monad?

There are at least two packages on Hackage that try to solve this problem once and for all: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/global-variables http://hackage.haskell.org/package/safe-globals Note that, for "global-variables", you may use an unexported newtype and an empty string if just using a global string smells bad for you. Cheers, -- Felipe.