Strictness of modify in Control.Monad.State.Strict

[Ben Gamari]

Is there a reason there is no `modify` operation in
Control.Monad.State.Strict (and the transformers analogue) which is
truly strict in the state? That is,

    modify' :: Monad m => (a -> a) -> StateM a m ()
    modify' f = get >>= (\x -> put $! f x)

While this is admittedly not a difficult piece of code to write, even
the suggestion in the documentation that `modify` isn't as strict as one
might think would likely save many man-hours of debugging (especially
for those who are less familiar with the language, for whom, speaking
from experience, strictness issues can pose a major hurdle to adoption)

In general it would be nice if the notion of strictness were better
addressed in the major libraries' documentation. It's a nuanced
issue which is not fully captured by a ".Lazy" or ".Strict" in the
module name.

Just a thought.

Thanks,

- Ben