Ross Paterson wrote:
But IO isn't a state monad: others are concurrently changing the world
without waiting for my Haskell program to terminate.
I think that closed-world behavior should be treated as a property of runST,
not of the ST monad operations. Otherwise your IORef = STRef IORegion
proposal doesn't work either, because e.g.
myId :: STRef s a -> a -> ST s a
myId r x = writeSTRef r x >> readSTRef r
doesn't necessarily return its second argument when lifted to IO, in the
presence of multithreading.
This philosophical objection to IO = ST IORegion has come up before, and I
think it's approaching the problem exactly backwards. If IO = ST IORegion
works in practice and is useful in practice, then we ought to be coming up
with a theory of IO/ST that supports it, not rejecting it on the basis of a
theory that doesn't support it.
-- Ben
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