Matthias Felleisen wrote:
When a C programmer thinks about the 'return' type of a C function, he thinks about the value-return half of a return statement's denotation. The other half, the modified store, remains entirely implicit as far as types are concerned.
Just because the type system of C keeps store implicit, it doesn't change the match between the meaning of 'return' in the two languages. The IO monad provides a refined way of typing imperative-style functions, including return statements. If you want to use a return statement in Haskell, you can, and it's called 'return'. (A reasonable alternative would be for 'return' to have second class status, as syntactic sugar for 'unit', analgous to otherwise=True). -- Scott Turner p.turner@computer.org http://www.billygoat.org/pkturner