[Quekid5]

Indeed, and I think it was a mistake by the parent poster to cast it as some sort of security thing. It very much isn't.[0]

Anyway, controlling side effects is really about avoiding accidental/unintentional side effects, i.e. mutating the world[1] by accident. Of course if everything is in IO, you only get "can do anything to the world" and "can't change the world at all", so Haskellers are usually interested in more fine-grained separation of effects than just pure/impure.

Of course, you are also trusting that code you're using doesn't do crazy unsafePerformIO, etc. stuff, but at least you can grep the code for that :). And sometimes unsafePerformIO can be a good thing to do 'magical' things which are referentially transparent but require mutation for asymptotics or performance generally.

[0] Safe Haskell is more about that kind of thing, but AFAIUI it isn't really in much use and never really took off. IIRC, it might even be slated for removal?

[1] Which is the ultimate shared mutable state, after all.

[dllthomas]

Right, my "in practice" was hedging for the existence of SafeHaskell, which does rely on the types and is "built in" to GHC, but as you say isn't really used by the community.