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Program Structuring in Haskell Slide 13 |
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Without even defining any instances of these classes, we can give simple examples to illustrate how they work in practice. The expression at the top of this slides is a short program, written in monadic style using the do-notation, and using the "new", "get" and "set" operations from the previous slide. The second half of the slide shows the type of this expression, which is calculated automatically by the standard type inference algorithm for Haskell. We can see three distinct elements here: the monad in which the computation takes place; the type of the result that it produces; and, most interestingly, an inferred collection of effects. In the past, some people have developed whole type systems just to information like this about effects. Here, we are able to use existing and well-understood mechanisms for type inference to achieve the same result. Moreover, we can also take advantage of properties of that algorithm about soundness and existence of principal types. Note, for example, that there are two separate region variables "r1" and "r2" in the type here, reflecting the fact that, in general, the two reference cells bound to "x" and "y" could be allocated in separate regions. |