I recently realized one important reason Haskell is so compact---it provides structures that avoid the need to name intermediate variables. I guess it's obvious, but coming from an imperative background I didn't see this at first. I am starting to recognize situations where all the existing wonderful typeclasses assist in eliminating variables. Function composition is the simplest example. I sometimes write long chains of composed functions. In an imperative language with a less compact function call syntax, that would require so many parentheses that you would probably break it over several statements, then forcing you to use more variables. Then I realized that Arrows allow a little more flexibility when you have different numbers of arguments to feed, say when you split a single argument into two, or want to construct a function that applies to one argument and ignores the other. ...So I had to write something like this. compute :: [Int] -> [Int] -> [Int] -> [(Int,Int)] func :: [Int] -> [(Int,Int)] func xs = compute xs (filter isSmall xs) (filter isLarge xs) but I could also write compute :: ([Int],([Int],[Int])) -> [(Int,Int)] func = compute . (id &&& filter isSmall &&& filter isLarge) So I had to change the inputs to 'compute' into this kind of awkward tuple form, but I eliminated four 'xs', plus eliminated the need to come up with the name 'xs'. Can I get a comment on whether this makes sense as way to do things? D