Haskell doesn't "need" an IO type—it wants one. The IO type gives us a language-level way to separate code that has side-effects from code that doesn't. It's a

Haskell doesn't "need" an IO type—it wants one. The IO type gives us a language-level way to separate code that has side-effects from code that doesn't. It's a powerful tool to help manage complexity in our programs. One of the advantages of keeping IO in an explicit IO type is that code that isn't in IO becomes easier to refactor. This is what people mean by referential transparency: since I know that a `Char` cannot implicitly depend on the state of the rest of the program, I am always free to move it around, put it in a variable or replace it with an equivalent expression without changing the meaning of the program. You would not get this with getChar :: Char because two getChars could give you different results, so moving them around or reordering them would change the semantics of your program.