Reading Learn You a Haskell (Chapter 13) or Functional Programming in Scala (Chapter 6), I was asked to call something that obtains a value that depends on some state, a state!
In other words, the type of that something is called State:
Okay, so it's really short for 'stateful computation' or 'state action/transition', but they shortened it to 'State', even though this is what s/S represents.
Confusing, right?
So what would I have called it?
How about, simply, Get,
since,
- instances obtain values
- the statefulness may be conveyed in the name of the trait/class/object of which it's a member (e.g. Stateful).
One argument against this name is that instances are sometimes used to set values (and store them in the state). However, it looks like this is still implemented by doing a get, using an instance of Get in which A is Unit.
Anyway, consider changing the name yourself if you too were confused. You never know, it might catch on.
