Full closures for D

[Bruce Adams]

Nathan Reed Wrote:

> Bruce Adams wrote:
> > Since they're on the language comparison feature chat it implies (to me at least) that there is some perceived benefit to the concept.
> > Any poor strictly functional guys care to explain what it is?
> > 
> 
> Here's a good introduction to monads in the context of Haskell:
> 
> http://research.microsoft.com/%7Esimonpj/Papers/marktoberdorf/mark.pdf
> 
> Basically, a monad is a type whose values represent actions.  An action 
> is something that, when done, has an effect on some global state and 
> then possibly returns a value.  There are operators that allow actions 
> to be composed in various ways.  So, in a pure functional programming 
> language, you never actually *do* anything imperatively - you just 
> construct a huge action, which contains everything your program should 
> do, by gluing together lots of itty-bitty actions (and pure functions). 
>   The construction of this action is done purely-fuctionally.  Then the 
> runtime executes the action, but this occurs outside of the language 
> proper, so it doesn't hurt your beautiful clean pure-functionality.
> 
> Thanks,
> Nathan Reed

But could there be any benefit to a 'non functional' language like D.
I just read a paper demonstrating how continuations can be viewed as a special case/use of monads for example.
Or perhaps in lazy evaluation of complex expressions?