On Feb 5, 2008 9:44 PM, Uwe Hollerbach
lisp> (UTCtime) "Wed Feb 6 03:57:45 UTC 2008" --- lisp> (UTCtime 1.203e9) "Thu Feb 14 14:40:00 UTC 2008" -- But after that, it sure seems to me as if I've taken data out of the IO monad... haven't I? Given that the second alternative never entered doIOAction and that after both are done I have a string of characters, prettily formatted to indicate a time, that's what it feels like to this unwashed C programmer.
Formatting a time is a completely pure operation. If you give the time formatting function the same timestamp, you always get the same string back. It is getting the *current* time which is in the IO monad, since it "returns" different results depending on at what time it is called. Luke