In Haskell and other pure functional programming languages, monads are used to model arbitrary contexts. For example, in Haskell, there is a package which provides the Tardis monad which provides a time traveling context[1]. It can be used to solve some classes of algorithmic problems quite elegantly[2].

1. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/tardis-0.4.4.0/docs/Cont...

2. https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Water_collected_between_towers?... (see the "see also" section for a Tardis implementation)