Kaveh Shahbazian wrote:
Thanks All
This is about my tries to understand monads and handling state - as
you perfectly know - is one of them. I have understood a little about
monads but that knowledge does not satidfy me. Again Thankyou
There are many tutorials available from the wiki at
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Books_and_tutorials#Using_Monads
and http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Monad
Another way is to look at the source code for the State monad and StateT
monad transformer, then you can see that the mysterious monad is nothing
other than a normal data or newtype declaration together with an instance
declaration ie:
-- from State.hs
newtype State s a = S (s -> (a,s))
instance Monad (State s) where
return a = S (\s -> (a, s))
S m >>= k = S (\s ->
let
(a, s1) = m s
S n = k a
in n s1)
So if you want to understand what's going on when you write:
do
x <- q
p
a first step is to remove the syntactic sugar to get:
q >>= (\x -> p)
and then replace the >>= with it's definition for the monad you're using.
For example with the State monad, (q) must be some expression which
evaluates to something of the form S fq where fq is a function with type
s -> (a,s), and similarly, (\x -> p) must have type a ->S ( s -> (a,s)). If
we choose names for these values which describe the types we have:
q = S s_as
p = a_S_s_as
so q >>= (\x -> p)
=== S s_as >>= a_S_s_as
=== S (\s0 ->
let
(a1, s1) = s_as s0
S s_a2s2 = a_S_s_as a1
in
s_a2s2 s1)
If we use State.runState s0 (q >>= (\x -> p)) to execute this composite
action, from the source we see that:
runState :: s -> State s a -> (a,s)
runState s (S m) = m s
so
runState s0 (q >>= (\x -> p))
=== runState s0 (S (\s0 -> let ... in s_a2s2 s1))
=== (\s0 -> let ... in s_a2s2 s1) s0
=== s_a2s2 s1
=== a2s2 -- ie (a2, s2)
Anyway I hope I haven't made things more complicated! ;-)
The best thing is to just try and work through some examples yourself with
pencil and paper and read lots of tutorials until things start clicking into
place.
Regards, Brian.
--
Logic empowers us and Love gives us purpose.
Yet still phantoms restless for eras long past,
congealed in the present in unthought forms,
strive mightily unseen to destroy us.
http://www.metamilk.com
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