Use of Haskell state monad a code smell?

Question

God I hate the term \"code smell\", but I can\'t think of anything more accurate.

I\'m designing a high-level language & compiler to Whitespace in my spare time

Answer 1

let's be careful about the terminology here. State is not per se bad; functional languages have state. What is a "code smell" is when you find yourself wanting to assign variables values and change them.

Of course, the Haskell state monad is there for just that reason -- as with I/O, it's letting you do unsafe and un-functional things in a constrained context.

So, yes, it's probably a code smell.