RE: [Haskell-cafe] STM, orElse and timed read from a channel

| > I think you are really asking for some way to create top-level | > transactional variables? | | Yes. Perhaps it would be easier to do it cleanly than arbitrary | top-level IO bindings? It turns out to be easy to provide newTVarIO :: a -> IO (TVar a) which you can call from inside 'unsafePerformIO'. That means you can allocate top-level TVars without fuss. The whole question of top-level IO remains open, but this will address the immediate question very nicely. I've also added a SourceForge bug to remind us to fail more tidily if you do atomically inside atomically. Simon