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.

The side effects occur in the context that causes the closure to be entered. Here's a nigh-trivial example. myClosure :: IO () myClosure = putStrLn "Hello, world." main = myClosure >> myClosure When myClosure is defined, the side effect doesn't occur yet. We just have a *definition* of an IO action that hasn't yet been bound into the program's sequence of actions. When main binds myClosure into the program's sequence of actions (twice), the side effect occurs (twice). Depending on the implementation of putStrLn, it may be faster the second time because the same closure has been entered before. HTH, Tom