Stack usage with a state monad

[Joe Thornber]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 11:54:27AM +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
> My *intuition* here is that the problem is with countLeaves2, in that it 
> must build the computation for the given [sub]tree before it can start to 
> evaluate it.  Maybe this is why other responses talk about changing the 
> state monad?
> 
> But why does this computation have be done in a state monad at 
> all?  countLeaves seems to me to be a pretty straightforward function from 
> a Tree to an Int, with no need for intervening state other than to 
> increment a counter:  as such, I'd have expected a simple recursive 
> function to serve the purpose.  (Maybe there was something in the original 
> application that was lost in the problem isolation?)

I think you might well be correct that I'm doing things the wrong way.
The original program is a chess prog. and the function in question is
the alphabeta search.  I wanted to hold the transposition table (a
cache of seen positions) among other things in the state monad.  I
thought this was the normal way to approach this, but am having doubts
now.  The recursive approach will indeed work, but I had hoped to
avoid all the code associated with threading the state by hand.

- Joe