[Haskell-cafe] State monad strictness - how?

[Dean Herington]

At 11:02 AM +0200 1/10/07, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
>
>Unfortunately, the current situation is that State is only
>available as a lazy monad, and StateT is only available
>as a strict monad.

[...]

>The obvious solution would be to have available
>both a lazy and a strict version of each monad: State,
>State', StateT, and State'T (or some such), with functions to
>convert between them. It is trivial to implement that in
>the current library.

First, thanks for the very helpful reply explaining the situation.

Second, how would one know that State is lazy and StateT is strict? 
I don't see that in the Haddock documentation.

Third, isn't it a continuum rather than a binary choice between lazy 
and strict?  In my example, I used ($!) in the definition of (>>=), 
but that's just one flavor of strictness that was appropriate to my 
example.  Is there some way to parameterize this degree of strictness?

Dean