[Haskell-cafe] State monad strictness - how?

[Iavor Diatchki]

Hello,

> Unfortunately, the current situation is that State is only
> available as a lazy monad, and StateT is only available
> as a strict monad.

There is no such distinction in monadLib.  The state transformer
inherits its behavior from the underlying monad. For example: StateT
Int IO is strict, but StatT Int Id is lazy.   One way to get a strict
state monad with monadLib is like this:

import MonadLib

data Lift a = Lift { runLift :: a }

instance Monad Lift where
  return x      = Lift x
  Lift x >>= f  = f x


strict = runLift $ runStateT 2 $
         do undefined
            return 5

lazy   = runId $ runStateT 2 $
         do undefined
            return 5

The difference between those two is that "strict == undefined", while
"lazy = (5,undefined)".
Unfortunately the monad "Lift" is not part of monadLib at the moment
so you have to define it on your own, like I did above, but I think
that this is a good example of when it is useful, so I will probably
add it to the next release.

-Iavor