Why is State Final not "final"?

[SillyFreak]

@Rogier

“cannot join content with dictionary”

There’s some related discussion here:

Can I attach and update state in metadata?

Thanks for taking the time to explain all the little details. #state("test", 0).update(cs => cs += 1) // Wouldn't even make sense, because if we don't use a function we would do, for example: #state("test", 0).update(1) Is the following description of states accurate? States themselves never change, but instead we put down markers (which live in the content) that are used to compute what the value of state at a given position should be. The markers that we put down only have the name of the st…

The problem is that update() is a kind of content: it doesn’t modify the state directly, but inserts a command to do it into the document. I alluded to this by saying that “update()s are inserted into the document”.

So since your outer update wants to return a dict, it struggles with combining that with the inner update (and even if it could, the inner update command would not be part of the document but somehow embedded in a state, which would mean it can’t act).

A workaround – that probably brings you back to your old problem – would be to move the inner update out, where you’d have to use context get() to access the current state.

The proper workaround would be to combine the two states. Instead of test_state having a dict and counter having a number, combine them into one state, e.g. combined_state with an initial value like (test_state: (..), counter: 0). Then you can still access context get().test_state and don’t need an inner update to modify the counter.