[Haskell-cafe] Tutorial for using the state monad or a better suggestion?

[Jefferson Heard]

Thanks.  There seems to be some consensus developing around using
IORefs to hold all the program state.

-- Jeff

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 12:11 PM, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH
<allbery at ece.cmu.edu> wrote:
>
>  On Feb 22, 2008, at 9:15 , Jefferson Heard wrote:
>
>  > Now I'm to the point of making this thing interactive, and I I'm
>  > trying to figure out the Haskell way of doing this.  Last time I wrote
>  > a program like this, I made a record data type with all the state and
>  > placed it into an IORef and curried it into the GLUT callback
>  > functions.  I'm going to do the same thing now if there aren't cringes
>  > and wailings from people with a better sense of pure-functional
>  > aesthetics out there on the list with a willingness to either point me
>  > towards a tutorial that would help me do this better.  Keep in mind
>  > that Graphics.UI.GLUT callbacks all want to return an IO (), and thus
>  > leftover state monads at ends of functions aren't going to be
>  > acceptable to the standard library...
>
>  What I do (with gtk2hs) is visible at http://hpaste.org/3137 ---
>  MWPState is a fairly large record.
>
>  I will note that this code stores the mutable data in separate
>  IORefs, whereas I'm told that it's better to use a single IORef with
>  all the mutable state inside it.  (For some reason I had assumed that
>  the overhead would be higher.)  That said, the wrappers make it
>  fairly easy to refactor it.  Since the IORef(s) and much of the
>  remaining state is read-only, I use a ReaderT IO instead of StateT
>  IO; this also turned out to be convenient for what turned out to be a
>  significant optimization (in response to a timer firing, it collects
>  a bunch of data and feeds it into a TreeView, and it turned out to be
>  useful to collect it all at the front and use local to roll a
>  modified record with the cached values).
>
>  (The code in that paste is rather out of date, probably I should
>  update it.)
>
>  --
>  brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
>  system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
>  electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH
>
>
>



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