HTTP is a stateless protocol. This fact has confused and tripped many aspiring web developers. Mostly stateless. It was stateless until Netscape, back in the misty days of 1994, baked cookies and released them for public consumption. Later the Internet power mind, IETF, published the standard baking recipes in their RFC 2109, followed later by RFC 2965, titled "HTTP state management mechanism".
The standard is clear and straight forward. Not surprisingly, it is a translation to network protocol language of one of the most widely used approaches of pure functional programming to managing state - when you have to care about state, thread it. In this post I'm trying to transcribe it. For my amusement, public confusion as well as for brevity I will use haskell like notation when trying to present the modelling of the utility of the http cookies as a carrier of the http state.
