[Haskell-cafe] Small question about something easy

[Luke Palmer]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 12:24 PM, iliali16 <iliali16 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Now the problem comes here:
>  play (p1 :>: p2) state
>              |play p1 state == (i1,state1) && play p2 state1 == (i2,state2)
>  = (i1+++i2,state2)
>
>  I know that if I manage to do that function the one above with this sign :>:
>  do not need to be impelmented since this one will cater for all the cases.
>  Can you please help me?

You just need a nice simple let or where clause:

  play (p1 :>: p2) state = (i1 +++ i2, state2)
    where
    (i1,state1) = play p1 state
    (i2,state2) = play p2 state1

Or equivalently:

  play (p1 :>: p2) state =
    let (i1, state1) = play p1 state
        (i2, state2) = play p2 state1
    in (i1 +++ i2, state2)

And there's nothing lazily recursive about these, just the information
usage is a little more complex.  But it could be implemented perfectly
naturally in scheme, for example.

For further exploration: the pattern here where the state is threaded
through different computations, is captured by the module
Control.Monad.State. So if "play" returned an object of a State monad,
such as:

  play :: Logo -> State TurtleState Image

Then this case could be implemented as:

  play (p1 :>: p2) = do
    i1 <- play p1
    i2 <- play p2
    return (i1 +++ i2)

Pretty, ain't it?  A little too pretty if you ask me.  Let's make it
uglier and shorter still:

  play (p1 :>: p2) = liftM2 (+++) (play p1) (play p2)

:-)

Luke