Utility of monads in Scheme (was: Re: [plt-scheme] Re: Scheme sources readability)

[John Clements]

On Sep 8, 2008, at 7:59 AM, hendrik at topoi.pooq.com wrote:
>
> Monads were invented so that you could do imperative stuff (at least
> top-level) within a purely functional language, and the theoretical
> combinator-calculus coding was to justify that it was, in some
> theoretical sense at least, still functional.
>
> Scheme is not purely functional, it has side-affecting
> operatins, and has no need for the monads.

Wellll.....

When regarded as a programming pattern, monads can certainly lead to  
some useful Scheme macros.  To take the canonical example, a state- 
passing interpreter is a whole heck of a lot easier to read when you  
introduce a do-like state-passing macro.


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