[Haskell-cafe] Re: simulation in the haskell way

[Ertugrul Soeylemez]

Eric Wong <wsysdu at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm relatively new to haskell and due to my strong imperative
> background, it's really a pain to learn haskell. But I'm really
> indulged in it. :)
>
> Now I think I understand the basics of Haskell very well, such as the
> type system and monad. And for those data-flow kind of applications, I
> can easily structure the problem in a functional way and sketch out an
> intuitive picture of the computation. But for simulation kind-of
> problems, in which I think OO really fits the best, what's the haskell
> way to structure such problems?  I once thought maybe I can use the
> State monad to simulate objects. But it's really hard for me to
> implement, because I think State monad is used to simulate a global
> shared state, is it right?
>
> Then what's the best way to simulate private states or just instead
> how to solve simulation problems such as a physical engine using the
> haskell way?

A state monad is used to encode a stateful computation.  Whether its
state is global or not really only depends on how long the computation
lives.  Here is how you can use one to maintain a list of objects:

  computation :: State [Object] Result
  computation = do
    objs0 <- get
    (result, objs1) <- doSomethingWith objs0
		put objs1
    return result

This is really just a convenient encoding of:

  computation :: [Object] -> (Result, [Object])

Whether that [Object] state is global really only depends on where you
use evalState, execState or runState and how long the computation takes.
I often do something like this, which you can regard as global 'state'
(or rather a global environment):

  type AppIO = ReaderT AppConfig IO

  myApp :: AppIO ()
  myApp = ...

  main :: IO ()
  main = getAppConfig >>= evalStateT myApp


Greets,
Ertugrul.


-- 
nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex)
http://blog.ertes.de/