I'm starting to figure out a few things that I didn't "get" about functional programming and monads. I wanted to explain them. I'm not looking for a particular response to this post, other than any elaboration that seems natural. There is an exercise here working with the trivial monad W: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2007/04/trivial-monad.html Write a function g :: W a -> W a -> W a such that g (W x) (W y) = W (x+y) except don't use pattern matching, but >>= instead. The answer is g mx my = mx >>= (\x -> my >>= \y -> W (x+y)) There are a couple things here that threw me off. One is that I didn't expect 'my' to be available inside the first lambda. I somehow thought of lambda as isolated, sealed-off from the rest of the universe. But they aren't. I believe this is the concept of closures, or related to it? Secondly, I didn't expect >>= to be available inside the lambda. This is related to the mistaken conception of >>= as a procedural statement rather than an expression. In Python, where I have previously encountered lambdas, no statements are allowed inside lambdas. Of course, >>= is actually an expression and you can put any expression to the right of a lambda ->. Maybe these are typical beginner misconceptions, or maybe they have more to do with coming from Python and complete beginners actually find it more natural. Mike