In people's responses to my serialization questions, I've seen them using $. I didn't know what it was so I've looked it up. Can someone please confirm my understanding of what it does, please? According to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Practical_monads, after the second code sample in the "Return Values" section, it seems to suggest that $ is only used to avoid using so many brackets. Which seems to make sense, but looking at it's definition in Prelude I really can't see why it's useful. Yitz gave me the code; fmap (runGet $ readNames n) $ L.hGetContents h So can I rewrite this without the $ like this? fmap (runGet (readNames n)) (L.hGetContents h) Is there any additional benefit to using $ than just not having to write as many brackets? Thanks, Tom