On 4/13/13 2:05 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Can anybody translate this for a non programmer person?
A state may be a complex graph, or a high dimensional space, but it is
still useful to recognize it can be represented by a value and that
(formal) transformations can be made either as a whole or in parts.
Since a change to a part is a change to the whole, not being clear on
how the composition works is bad. Functional programming (roughly
speaking, recursion) requires this consistency. It's not that
iteration is a more versatile description, but it is sloppier. Nothing
gets glossed-over using monadic types for state. In the example code,
e.g., the counter state cannot escape or be mutated outside the scope of
the `runState'.
Marcus
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