Ok, You wrote But please, let's keep one foot in the real world if possible.
Monads were invented to solve the "how do I do imperative programming in a pure functional language" problem.
This is more than a little revisionist. Monads have been the subject of mathematical study before people had an inkling that they might apply to problems in computer science. Moggi didn't invent them, but noticed that they might have an application to issues of composition in computation. It is really intriguing that they do such a remarkable job of organizing notions of update and were not invented with this application in mind. So, revising history thus would be a real loss. Best wishes, --greg -- L.G. Meredith Managing Partner Biosimilarity LLC 505 N 72nd St Seattle, WA 98103 +1 206.650.3740 http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com