[Haskell-beginners] Re: Random animals

[Amy de Buitléir]

Amy de Buitléir <amy <at> nualeargais.ie> writes:

I realised that that approach leads to a small problem for me. I have written a
couple of modules with dozens of functions that work with randomness, and they're
all in the State monad. I don't want to rewrite them all to be in the IO monad
instead, because I think that design approach would be less clean. But I did some
more searching, and discovered that if I use newStdGen instead of getStdGen, my
original design works just fine. So for posterity, here's another working 
solution.


import "mtl" Control.Monad.State
import System.Random

-- | Choose an element at random from a list and return the element and its index
-- Ex: runState (randomListSelection ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']) (mkStdGen 1)
randomListSelection :: (RandomGen s) => [a] -> State s (Int, a)
randomListSelection xs = do
  i <- State $ randomR (0,length xs - 1)
  return (i, xs !! i)

chooseCreatur = do
  g <- newStdGen
  return (evalState (randomListSelection ["cat", "dog", "lion", "mouse"]) g)