All in the title; Since the change in GHC, 7.10 i think, where all Monad instances had to have Applicative instances too, in theory all monads must have a pure method that should be identical to return, right? My subjectively superficial reason for preferring pure (and caring about the issue in the first place) is twofold: shorter (i know, i know, still the shorter, the quicker to read and then understand in the code) and, mostly, less semantically-awkward --honestly the name "stains" the functional semantics in Monadic code, in my opinion, but that's just personal. (For those who know, it feels like the "new" operator in JS (OO class-instanciation semantical imitation)) Of course now I'm perfectly used to, have no trouble seeing it for what it is all the time, not mixing it up with some imperative-like "return" concept. Yet i don't really like it much at all, so I wanted to know to which extent it is safe to always use pure even in explicitly Monadic contexts. Thankx in advance!