I've written a very simple piece of code in order to help me understand Monads better: ---------- import "mtl" Control.Monad.State countAnotherSheep :: Int -> (String, Int) countAnotherSheep n = (show n ++ " sheep", n+1) sheepCounter = State { runState = countAnotherSheep } ---------- So far so good. Now I can do things like: ghci> evalState sheepCounter 1 "1 sheep" ghci> evalState sheepCounter 2 "2 sheep" ghci> execState sheepCounter 1 2 ghci> execState sheepCounter 2 3 ghci> evalState (sequence $ replicate 5 sheepCounter) 1 ["1 sheep","2 sheep","3 sheep","4 sheep","5 sheep"] But what I really want to do is create a main function in which I: 1. Count some sheep. 2. Do something else. 3. Count some more sheep, picking up where I left off. I could thread the state like this: increment (_, n) = countAnotherSheep n main = do let c = countAnotherSheep 1 putStrLn $ fst c let c2 = increment c putStrLn $ fst c2 putStrLn "Now I'll do some other stuff" let c3 = increment c2 putStrLn $ fst c3 ... but shouldn't the State monad make threading the state unnecessary? It seems like there should be a way to do this, but I can't figure it out. Thank you in advance for any suggestions.