From what you wrote, it sounds like what Haskell buys you is a layer of indirection - the proper analogy is not between a Haskell program and a C program, but i

From what you wrote, it sounds like what Haskell buys you is a layer of indirection - the proper analogy is not between a Haskell program and a C program, but instead between a Haskell program and a C compiler. A C compiler does not care in what order it outputs code, so long as it all gets output by the time it finishes. If I understand this, Haskell "compiles" pure code into a sequence of side effects, and then the RTS executes them. So say I wrote a C compiler, that, given a source code, outputs a subcompiler that compiles the source code and then executes it. My C code does the same thing as it would under a traditional compiler, except more slowly - why should I want this?