Re: [Haskell-cafe] Linguistic hair-splitting

Am Donnerstag 28 Januar 2010 09:14:38 schrieb Ketil Malde:

Daniel Fischer writes:

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It has been known to call such things 'computations',

I think "actions" has been used, too, but perhaps mostly for things in IO and similar monads?

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as opposed to 'values', and even to separate the categories of types and expressions which deliver the two.

As usual, that only works part of the time. [1,4,15,3,7] is not a computation, it's a list of numbers. A plain and simple everyday value.

But isn't a value of (IO String) equally plain and simple?

Sure, but saying a value of type IO String is "a computation (in the IO monad) returning a String" makes more sense to me than saying [True,False,True] is "a computation (in the [] monad) returning a Bool".

I think I prefer (as somebody suggested) "monadic value",

Yes, that works for all monads.

so that (if you want to stress this aspect of its use) the list is a monadic Int value in the [] monad, while getLine is a monadic String value in the IO monad, and so on. Maybe.

-k