Managing state - chapter 3 of SICP

Question

I've been working through in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and completing the exercises in Haskell. The first two chapters were fine (code at github) but Chapter 3 is making me think harder.

It starts by talking about managing state, with the example of a bank account. They define a function make-withdraw by

(define (make-withdraw balance)
    (lambda (amount)
        (if (>= balance amount)
            (begin (set! balance (- balance amount))
                balance)
            "Insufficient funds")))

so that you can execute the following code:

(define w1 (make-withdraw 100))
(define w2 (make-withdraw 100))

(w1 50)
50

(w2 70)
30

(w2 40)
"Insufficient funds"

(w1 40)
10

I'm not sure how I can emulate this in Haskell. I first thought to a some simple function using the State monad:

import Control.Monad.State

type Cash    = Float
type Account = State Cash

withdraw :: Cash -> Account (Either String Cash)
withdraw amount = state makewithdrawal where
    makewithdrawal balance = if balance >= amount
        then (Right amount, balance - amount)
        else (Left "Insufficient funds", balance)

which allows me to run the code

ghci> runState (do { withdraw 50; withdraw 40 }) 100
(Left "Insufficient funds",30.0)

but that does something different to the scheme code. Ideally I'd be able to run something like

do
  w1 <- makeWithdraw 100
  w2 <- makeWithdraw 100
  x1 <- w1 50
  y1 <- w2 70
  y2 <- w2 40
  x2 <- w1 40
  return [x1,y1,y2,x2]

[Right 50,Right 70,Left "Insufficient funds",Right 40]

but I'm not sure how to write the function makeWithdraw. Any advice?

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 06 '12 at 19:50

The Scheme code is sneakily using two bits of state: one is the (implicit) association between variables w1 and w2 and a ref-cell; the other is the (explicit) state stored in a ref-cell. There's a couple different ways to model this in Haskell. For example, we might pull a similar ref-cell trick with ST:

makeWithdraw :: Float -> ST s (Float -> ST s (Either String Float))
makeWithdraw initialBalance = do
    refBalance <- newSTRef initialBalance
    return $ \amount -> do
        balance <- readSTRef refBalance
        let balance' = balance - amount
        if balance' < 0
            then return (Left "insufficient funds")
            else writeSTRef refBalance balance' >> return (Right balance')

Which lets us do this:

*Main> :{
*Main| runST $ do
*Main|   w1 <- makeWithdraw 100
*Main|   w2 <- makeWithdraw 100
*Main|   x1 <- w1 50
*Main|   y1 <- w2 70
*Main|   y2 <- w2 40
*Main|   x2 <- w1 40
*Main|   return [x1,y1,y2,x2]
*Main| :}
[Right 50.0,Right 30.0,Left "insufficient funds",Right 10.0]

Another option is to make both pieces of the state explicit, for example by associating each account with a unique Int id.

type AccountNumber = Int
type Balance = Float
data BankState = BankState
    { nextAccountNumber :: AccountNumber
    , accountBalance :: Map AccountNumber Balance
    }

Of course, we would then basically be re-implementing the ref-cell operations:

newAccount :: Balance -> State BankState AccountNumber
newAccount balance = do
    next <- gets nextAccountNumber
    modify $ \bs -> bs
        { nextAccountNumber = next + 1
        , accountBalance = insert next balance (accountBalance bs)
        }
    return next

withdraw :: Account -> Balance -> State BankState (Either String Balance)
withdraw account amount = do
    balance <- gets (fromMaybe 0 . lookup account . accountBalance)
    let balance' = balance - amount
    if balance' < 0
        then return (Left "insufficient funds")
        else modify (\bs -> bs { accountBalance = insert account balance' (accountBalance bs) }) >> return (Right balance')

Which would then let us write makeWithdraw:

makeWithDraw :: Balance -> State BankState (Balance -> State BankState (Either String Balance))
makeWithdraw balance = withdraw <$> newAccount balance

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 06 '12 at 19:49

Well, you have multiple pieces of independent, mutable state here: one for each "account" in the system. The State monad only lets you have one piece of state. You could store something like (Int, Map Int Cash) in the state, incrementing the Int to get a fresh key into the map each time, and use that to store the balance... but that's so ugly, isn't it?

Thankfully, however, Haskell has a monad for multiple pieces of independent, mutable state: ST.

type Account = ST

makeWithdraw :: Cash -> Account s (Cash -> Account s (Either String Cash))
makeWithdraw amount = do
    cash <- newSTRef amount
    return withdraw
  where
    withdraw balance
        | balance >= amount = do
            modifySTRef cash (subtract amount)
            return $ Right amount
        | otherwise = return $ Left "Insufficient funds"

With this, your code example should work fine; just apply runST and you should get the list you want. The ST monad is pretty simple: you can just create and modify STRefs, which act just like regular mutable variables; in fact, their interface is basically identical to that of IORefs.

The only tricky bit is the extra s type parameter, referred to as the state thread. This is used to associate each STRef with the ST context it's created in. It would be very bad if you could return an STRef from an ST action, and carry it across to another ST context — the whole point of ST is that you can run it as pure code, outside of IO, but if the STRefs could escape, you'd have impure, mutable state outside of the monadic context, just by wrapping all your operations in runST! So, each ST and STRef carries around the same s type parameter, and runST has the type runST :: (forall s. ST s a) -> a. This stops you choosing any particular value for s: your code has to work with all possible values of s. It's never assigned any particular type; just used as a trick to keep the state threads isolated.

Managing state - chapter 3 of SICP

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