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I have been trying to understand closures in haskell and how they relate to side effects. I have been looking around but all I find are trivial examples with no side effects. Please let me know if you know of any examples.

Bulat> what you mean by 'closure'? Perhaps you are refering to something like the Accumlator generator in Lisp: (defun mkacc (n) (lambda (i) (incf n i))) or Scheme: (define (mkacc n) (lambda (i) (set! n (+ n i)) n)) (the term closure explained in footnote 6 in SICP here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-15.html#footnote_Temp_1...: "A closure is an implementation technique for representing procedures with free variables.") ? In Haskell you can do this, but all side effects are made explicit and can only be used within code marked with IO (in the IO monad): import Data.IORef mkAcc :: (Num a) => a -> IO (a -> IO a) mkAcc n = do r <- newIORef n return (\i -> do modifyIORef r (+i) readIORef r) (These examples are from http://www.paulgraham.com/accgen.html, by the way.) On 6/26/06, dkarapet wrote:

I have been trying to understand closures in haskell and how they relate to side effects. I have been looking around but all I find are trivial examples with no side effects. Please let me know if you know of any examples.

in Haskell, expression may have a side effect only if it has "IO a" return type. it is then whole point of pure lazy language - evaluation of pure (not "IO") expression can be deferred until it's value really need and language guarantee that this don't change anything (including lack of any side effects) Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com

The reason you need IO in the type that the compiler/type system forces you to isolate side effects from pure code so all your pure code stays pure. There is a good explanation here, under Pure Functions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Programming#Pure_functions The reason purity is **enforced** is similar to the reason "goto" is considered harmful: the belief is that the programmer receives great benefits this tradeoff. In exchange for giving up side effects in arbitrary places, the programmer gains freedom in knowing that all pure functions are free from side-effects related bugs and her code is easier to reason about mathematically. My understanding is that Haskell's execution model is a lot more involved than, say, Scheme, because pure code is more flexibly refactored by the compiler and because the runtime evaluation strategy for lazy evaluation is less obviously implemented. In this sense, if I undertsand correctly, Haskell doesn't really use closures as an implementation strategy (as defined above), if that is what your question is refering to, and I'm not surprised that you don't find interesting examples in Haskell, especially any involving side effects. Jared. -- http://www.updike.org/~jared/ reverse ")-:"