A Typical State

Observe that the states in typical models talk about

booleans    integers   vectors     records   caches
bits        symbols    arrays      stacks    files
characters  strings    sequences   tables    directories

These objects are discrete rather than continuous; furthermore they are built incrementally or inductively by repeatedly using primitive operations to put together smaller pieces.

The functions we need to manipulate these objects do things like concatenate, reverse, sort, search, count, etc.