Jonathan Cast wrote:
On 31 Jan 2008, at 1:23 AM, Reinier Lamers wrote:
Bayley, Alistair wrote:
More than one person has posted previously about the flaws and traps
of lazy IO. A common position seems to be "don't do lazy IO".
Still, when I was browsing the Haskell' wiki a few days ago, I
couldn't find any proposal to remove lazy I/O or move it into some
special System.IO.Lazy (or
System.IO.UnsafeEvilFunctionsThatSacrificeBabies) ...
Sacrificing babies is not a unique characteristic of lazy IO, of course;
it's true of any file IO on a non-versioning file system.
However you can contain the pain if it's in the IO monad, and be in no
worse situation than conventional languages.
If the pain is unsafeInterleaved all over the place, then you actually
*are* in a worse situation.
ObHaskell' : lazy IO shouldn't be in any haskell standard, since it's
not referentially transparent. It should be a powerful but dangerous
feature enabled by certain implementations in an implementation specfic
way. (unsafeInterleaveIO itself is not haskel98, I'm fairly sure)
Jules
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