Hi all,

I teach a high school class in Computer Science. The current programming goal is to implement chat-bots, and we're using Haskell of course. Now one of my students had the seemingly easy idea of having the bot answer with a random sentence if it doesn't have "good" answer.

Random in Haskell has its problems. I understand why you can't just call a function as you would in Java. I'm not firm enough with monads myself (and certainly don't want to go there in the class beyond I/O) so I'm calling for help here: Is there a way to wrap the generation of random numbers so that for the students it works like a function?

We have this working:

> import System.Random

> main =
>   do randomNumber <- randomRIO (1::Int,2)
>      print (randomAnswer randomNumber)

> randomAnswer r
>       | (r == 1) = "Nope!"
>       | (r == 2) = "Absolutely!"
>   | otherwise = "Error!"

Now, how can we use it for something like this:

>findAnswer [] = "h"
>findAnswer (x:xs)
>       | (z == "unknown") = findAnswer xs
>       | otherwise = z
>   where z = findWord x lexikon

where instead of getting "h" we'd like to call a function that would give us one of the strings out of randomAnswer.
(findAnswer looks through a list [(keyword,response)].

I've looked at realworldhaskell and the wikibook among other sources, but I can't manage to piece anything useful together. How do I manage to get something of type IO to represent itself as a String?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.