[Haskell-cafe] Advice for clean code.

[David McBride]

I am still in the early stages learning haskell, which is my first foray 
into functional programming.  Well there's no better way to learn than 
to write something, so I started writing a game.

Mostly the thing looks good so far, far better than the C version did.  
However, my problem is that code like the following is showing up more 
often and it is becoming unwieldy.

gameLoop :: World -> IO ()
gameLoop w = do
   drawScreen w

   action <- processInput

   let (result, w') = processAction action w

   case result of
     MoveOutOfBounds -> putStrLn "Sorry you can't move in that direction."
     MoveBadTerrain a -> case a of
       Wall -> putStrLn "You walk into a wall."
       Tree -> putStrLn "There is a tree in the way."
       otherwise -> putStrLn "You can't move there."
     otherwise -> return ()

   let w'' = w' { window = updateWindowLocation (window w') (location $ 
player w')}

   unless (action == Quit) (gameLoop w'')

Where world contains the entire game's state and so I end up with w's 
with multiple apostrophes at the end.  But at the same time I can't 
really break these functions apart easily.  This is error prone and 
seems pointless.

I have been reading about control.monad.state and I have seen that I 
could run execstate over this and use modify but only if each function 
took a world and returned a world.  That seems really limiting.  I'm not 
even sure if this is what I should be looking at.

I am probably just stuck in an imperative mindset, but I have no idea 
what to try to get rid of the mess and it is only going to get worse 
over time.  Any suggestions on what I can do about it?