Steve Schafer wrote:
"basically everything I write programs for is mainly about I/O..."
It's funny how people always seem to think that, but if you look at what
they're really doing, I/O is usually the least of their worries.
Programming GUIs is about the only reasonably common I/O-related task
that has any sort of complexity. Most everything else is reading or
writing streams of bytes; the hard part is what happens between the
reading and the writing.
Indeed, I replied "if all you want to do is run some algorithm over some
data, you can write a thin layer to do the I/O, and then write the rest
in pure code". And everybody was like "er, I don't understand what
distinction you think you're making..."
Obviously, what I meant is that one can write
main = do
stuff <- readFile "source.txt"
writeFile "source.exe" $ compile stuff
compile = ...
I guess because in most normal programming languages you can do I/O
anywhere you damn like, it doesn't occur to most programmers that it's
possible to make a seperation. (Most seem to realise that, e.g., mixing
business logic with GUI code is a Bad Thing though...)
I saw a quote somewhere round here that went like this:
"Haskell isn't really suited to heavily I/O-oriented programs."
"What, you mean like darcs?"
"...oh yeah."
;-)
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