Hello Rodney, Tuesday, October 28, 2008, 1:27:26 AM, you wrote:

Now I define an IORef and a couple of counters that share the IORef,

...

iio :: IO (IORef Int) iio = newIORef 0 ic1 = do { io <- iio ; count io 0 } ic2 = do { io <- iio ; count io 0 }

So apparently my mental picture of an IORef as a pointer to a value is wrong. I need a new mental picture. What's going on here?

this part is right. but "iio = newIORef 0" doesn't define IORef, instead it defines *operation* that creates new IORef and returns it then ic1 and ic2 are *operations* that performs iio, creating new IORef on each call, and then use this new IORef in further operation look at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IO_inside -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com