Question

I find it difficult for me to understand the MonadState .

The reason maybe most of the examples mixing up with record syntax in their data structure.

So, I tried to implement the MonadState without using record syntax.

The following code I wrote did pass the compiler, but it seems totally nonsense to me.

What is wrong with these code?

Is there a simple example of implementing MonadState without using record syntax?

data Foo a b = Foo (Maybe ([a],b)) deriving (Show)

unwrapFoo :: Foo a b -> Maybe ([a],b)
unwrapFoo (Foo x) = x

instance Monad (Foo [a]) where
  return x = Foo $ Just ([], x) 
  m >>= f  = case unwrapFoo m of
               Just (_, r) -> f r
               Nothing     -> Foo Nothing 

instance MonadState Int (Foo [a]) where
  get   = Foo $ Just ([], 1)     
  put _ = Foo $ Just ([],())


*Main> get :: Foo [a] Int
Foo (Just ([],1))
*Main> put 3 :: Foo [a] ()
Foo (Just ([],()))
*Main>
Was it helpful?

Solution

So let's start with the basic idea of the State Monad.

newtype MyState s a = MyState (s {- current state -}
                           -> (s {- New state -}, a {- New value -}))

unwrap (MyState f) = f

So now we need to implement >>= and return.

return is pretty easy:

return a = MyState $ \s -> -- Get the new state
                     (s, a) -- and pack it into our value

In other words, this just passes the current state through with a new value.

And now >>=

(MyState f) >>= g = MyState $ \state -> 
    let (newState, val) = f state
        MyState newF    = g val
    in newF state

So we get a new state, feed it into our existing state monad, then pass the resulting value/state pair into g and return the result of that.

The total number of differences between this and the record syntax is just that I had to manually define unwrap.

To complete our monad

runState = unwrap

get = MyState \s -> (s, s)
put a = MyState \s -> (a, ())
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