[Haskell-cafe] State Monad - using the updated state in an adhoc manner

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On 2009 Jan 7, at 20:58, Phil wrote:
> -- 124353542542 is just an arbitrary seed
> main :: IO()
> main = do
>        let x = evalState getRanq1 (ranq1Init 124353542542)
>        print (x)

You're throwing away the state you want to keep by using evalState  
there.  But you're also missing the point of using State; done right  
the evalState *is* what you want.

What you want to do is run all of your operations within State,  
exiting it only when you're done:

 > main = do
 >     print (evalState doRanqs (ranq1init 124353542542))
 >
 > doRanqs = do
 >     r <- getRanq1
 >     -- do something involving it
 >     another <- getRanq1
 >     -- do more stuff

Alternately you may use a tail recursive function or a fold, etc.,  
depending on what exactly you're trying to accomplish.

You do *not* want to execState or runState every individual time you  
want a random number; if you do that you'll have to carry the random  
state around yourself (in effect you'd be rewriting the State monad by  
hand, poorly).  Stay in State and let it do the carrying for you.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20090108/7821d06c/attachment.htm