Control.Monad.IO.Class

Class of monads based on IO.

Documentation

class Monad m => MonadIO m where

Monads in which IO computations may be embedded. Any monad built by applying a sequence of monad transformers to the IO monad will be an instance of this class.

Instances should satisfy the following laws, which state that liftIO is a transformer of monads:

• liftIO . return = return

• liftIO (m >>= f) = liftIO m >>= (liftIO . f)

Methods

liftIO :: IO a -> m a

Lift a computation from the IO monad. This allows us to run IO computations in any monadic stack, so long as it supports these kinds of operations (i.e. IO is the base monad for the stack).

Example

import Control.Monad.Trans.State -- from the "transformers" library

printState :: Show s => StateT s IO ()
printState = do
  state <- get
  liftIO $ print state

Had we omitted liftIO, we would have ended up with this error:

• Couldn't match type ‘IO’ with ‘StateT s IO’
 Expected type: StateT s IO ()
   Actual type: IO ()

The important part here is the mismatch between StateT s IO () and IO ().

Luckily, we know of a function that takes an IO a and returns an (m a): liftIO, enabling us to run the program and see the expected results:

> evalStateT printState "hello"
"hello"

> evalStateT printState 3
3

Instances

MonadIO IO

Since: base-4.9.0.0

Defined in Control.Monad.IO.Class

Methods

liftIO :: IO a -> IO a