I wrote:

Now that RealWorld, formerly an implementation trick inside GHC, has become part of the public interface:

stToIO :: ST RealWorld a -> IO a

(to make stToIO sound), I think it needs a better name. The IO monad does not in fact give you exclusive access to the world, but to a region of the heap separate from those used by invocations of runST. (That's not all IO does, of course, but it's the relevant part for stToIO.) I propose IORegion.

On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 02:54:55PM +0100, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

Would be fine with me.

On reflection, IORegion sounds a bit operational; perhaps IOState is better (though I see the name is used in HOpenGL for something else). More suggestions: 1) Pursuing the view that this thing identifies a special ST-style state included in the IO monad, we could view the IO state stuff as a special case of the ST stuff, changing newtype IORef a = IORef (STRef IOState a) newtype IOArray i e = IOArray (STArray IOState i e) newtype IOUArray i e = IOUArray (STUArray RealWorld i e) (currently exported opaquely) to type IORef = STRef IOState type IOArray = STArray IOState type IOUArray = STUArray IOState so that there would only be one type of reference. 2) For additional genericity, define a class class MonadST s m | m -> s where liftST :: Control.Monad.ST.ST s a -> m a with instances instance MonadST s (Control.Monad.ST.ST s) where liftST = id instance MonadST s (Control.Monad.ST.Lazy.ST s) where liftST = strictToLazyST instance MonadST IOState IO where liftST = stToIO instance MonadST s m => MonadST s (ContT r m) where liftST = lift . liftST ... then all the operations lift to all such monads, e.g. readSTRef :: MonadST s m => STRef s a -> m a readSTRef r = liftST (Data.STRef.readSTRef r) The instantiations for Control.Monad.ST.Lazy.ST and IO are identical to the existing definitions of Data.STRef.Lazy.readSTRef and readIORef respectively, and similarly for other operations, arrays, etc. This class would need to be in base, to permit instance MonadST s m => MArray (STArray s) e m instance MonadST s m => MArray (STUArray s) Bool m etc I recall that you proposed a RefMonad class on the haskell list in Feb 2002, but the problem there was that references were tied to a monad, rather than the state within the monad.