X-Git-Url: http://lambda.jimpryor.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=lambda.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=week9.mdwn;h=a0c843224b4df706141c26ae13658f07b3701e4c;hp=06e4dd0d6f3fe815fe2e7f1ab77fae899dd30c84;hb=b4c60518c56a1af8aa4dc6ca15a58d0e46c513d2;hpb=53965b8b9083936486589d19e5846d76f2945a24 diff --git a/week9.mdwn b/week9.mdwn index 06e4dd0d..a0c84322 100644 --- a/week9.mdwn +++ b/week9.mdwn @@ -217,6 +217,8 @@ At the end, we'll get `(1, 2, 3)`. The reference cell that gets updated when we Here, too, just as in the OCaml fragment, all the calls to getter and setter are working with a single mutable variable `free_var`. +If you've got a copy of *The Seasoned Schemer*, which we recommended for the seminar, see the discussion at pp. 91-118 and 127-137. + If however you called `factory` twice, you'd have different `getter`/`setter` pairs, each of which had their own, independent `free_var`. In OCaml: let factory (starting_val : int) = @@ -469,29 +471,29 @@ Notice the similarities (and differences) between the implementation of these tw With the Reader monad, we also had some special-purpose operations, beyond its general monadic operations. These were `lookup` and `shift`. With the State monad, we'll also have some special-purpose operations. We'll consider two basic ones here. One will be to retrieve what is the current store. This is like the Reader monad's `lookup`, except in this simple implementation there's only a single location for a value to be looked up from. Here's how we'll do it: - let get_store : store state = + let state_get : store state = fun s -> (s, s);; This passes through the current store unaltered, and also returns a copy of the store as its value. We can use this operation like this: - some_existing_state_monad_box >>= fun _ -> get_store >>= (fun cur_store -> ...) + some_existing_state_monad_box >>= fun _ -> state_get >>= (fun cur_store -> ...) The `fun _ ->` part here discards the value wrapped by `some_existing_state_monad_box`. We're only going to pass through, unaltered, whatever *store* is generated by that monadic box. We also wrap that store as *our own value*, which can be retrieved by further operations in the `... >>= ...` chain, such as `(fun cur_store -> ...)`. The other operation for the State monad will be to update the existing store to a new one. This operation looks like this: - let set_store (new_store : int) : dummy state = + let state_put (new_store : int) : dummy state = fun s -> (dummy, new_store);; If we want to stick this in a `... >>= ...` chain, we'll need to prefix it with `fun _ ->` too, like this: - some_existing_state_monad_box >>= fun _ -> set_store 100 >>= ... + some_existing_state_monad_box >>= fun _ -> state_put 100 >>= ... -In this usage, we don't care what value is wrapped by `some_existing_state_monad_box`. We don't even care what store it generates, since we're going to replace that store with our own new store. A more complex kind of `set_store` operation might insert not just some constant value as the new store, but rather the result of applying some function to the existing store. For example, we might want to increment the current store. Here's how we could do that: +In this usage, we don't care what value is wrapped by `some_existing_state_monad_box`. We don't even care what store it generates, since we're going to replace that store with our own new store. A more complex kind of `state_put` operation might insert not just some constant value as the new store, but rather the result of applying some function to the existing store. For example, we might want to increment the current store. Here's how we could do that: - some_existing_state_monad_box >>= fun _ -> get_store >>= (fun cur_store -> set_store (cur_store + 1) >>= ... + some_existing_state_monad_box >>= fun _ -> state_get >>= (fun cur_store -> state_put (cur_store + 1) >>= ... -We can of course define more complex functions that perform the `get_store >>= (fun cur_store -> set_store (cur_store + 1)` as a single operation. +We can of course define more complex functions that perform the `state_get >>= (fun cur_store -> state_put (cur_store + 1)` as a single operation. In general, a State monadic **box** (type `'a state`, what appears at the start of a `... >>= ... >>= ...` chain) is an operation that accepts some starting store as input---where the store might be simple as it is here, or much more complex---and returns a value plus a possibly modified store. This can be thought of as a static encoding of some computation on a store, which encoding is used as a box wrapped around a value of type `'a`. (And also it's a burrito.) @@ -694,7 +696,7 @@ Programming languages tend to provide a bunch of mutation-related capabilities a in let (adder', setter') = factory 1 in ... - Of course, in most languages you wouldn't be able to evaluate a comparison like `getter = getter'`, because in general the question whether two functions always return the same values for the same arguments is not decidable. So typically languages don't even try to answer that question. However, it would still be true that `getter` and `getter'` (and `adder` and `adder'`) were extensionally equivalent. + Of course, in most languages you wouldn't be able to evaluate a comparison like `getter = getter'`, because in general the question whether two functions always return the same values for the same arguments is not decidable. So typically languages don't even try to answer that question. However, it would still be true that `getter` and `getter'` (and `adder` and `adder'`) were extensionally equivalent; you just wouldn't be able to establish so. However, they're not numerically identical, because by calling `setter 2` (but not calling `setter' 2`) we can mutate the function value `getter` (and `adder`) so that it's *no longer* qualitatively indiscernible from `getter'` (or `adder'`).