:t pause pause :: Double ->

In the thread "Precise timing https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/haskell-cafe/sf8W4KBTYqQ", in response to something ugly I was doing, Rohan Drape provided the following code: import Control.Concurrent import Control.Monad import System.IO import Sound.OSC main = withMax $ mapM_ note (cycle [1,1,2]) withMax = withTransport (openUDP "127.0.0.1" 9000) sin0 param val = sendMessage (Message "sin0" [string param,float val]) pause = liftIO . pauseThread . (* 0.1) note n = do sin0 "frq" 300 sin0 "amp" 1 pause n sin0 "amp" 0 pause n For days I have monkeyed with it, and studied the libraries it imports, and I remain sorely confused. *How can the "a" in "IO a" be a handle?* Here are two type signatures: openUDP :: String -> Int -> IO UDP withTransport :: Transport t => IO t -> Connection t a -> IO a Rohan's code makes clear that openUDP creates a handle representing the UDP connection. openUDP's type signature indicates that its output is an "IO UDP". How can I reconcile those two facts? When I read about the IO type, all sources seem to indicate that "IO a" represents a value of type "a" wrapped in an IO context. For instance, when putting Strings to the screen, one passes around "IO String" values. Until this OSC library, I had never seen the "a" in "IO a" represent a pipe; it had always represented data to be passed *through* a pipe. *Why the long signature?* When I ask for it, GHC provides the following additional type signatures: transformers-0.3.0.0:Control.Monad.Trans.Reader.ReaderT UDP IO () What's up with that? *What type is note? (and related questions)* GHCI goes on: > :t sin0 sin0 :: (SendOSC m, Real n) => String -> n -> m () > :t note note :: Double -> transformers-0.3.0.0:Control.Monad.Trans.Reader.ReaderT UDP IO () note calls both sin0 and pause. It appears that note's type signature takes pause, but not sin0, into account, but I must be wrong about that. sin0 returns a SendOSC. pause applies liftIO to pauseThread. The result must be a SendOSC too, because sin0 and pause are both called in the same do loop. SendOSC implements these three classes: (Monad (ReaderT t io), Transport t, MonadIO io) => SendOSC (ReaderT t io) Is the liftIO that pause applies to pauseThread, then, the "default" liftIO defined in the MonadIO library? *How to read the "instances" portion of Hackage documentation?* In the Hackage documentation https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hosc-0.13/docs/Sound-OSC-Transport-Monad... for the SendOSC type, how should I be reading this line? (Monad (ReaderT t io), Transport t, MonadIO io) => SendOSC (ReaderT t io) I understand the middle two clauses: that io should be of type MonadIO, and t should be of type Transport. The outer two clauses, though, I don't know how to interpret. (I looked at the code https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hosc-0.13/docs/src/Sound-OSC-Transport-M... and saw nothing that clearly corresponded to that line in the documentation.)