Let me know if I'm bugging you guys too much. It'd be great if I had someone close at hand who knew more about Haskell than I do, but unfortunately I don't. Are there any fora that are especially for people to help novices, or is haskell-cafe the best fit? I decided I ought to learn more about monads, so I've been trying to do simple IO. However, I'm running into really basic problems that I haven't managed to solve with the three monad tutorials I've read so far! First, given an IO String, I don't seem to be able to take the head of it to get an IO Char. I'm guessing that the IO monad is quite unlike the simple 'tainting' I first imagined; I reall do seem to have to treat it as an abstract polymorphic type. Worse, I can't work out how to write a IO String -> IO Char version of head; I can't make my (x:xs) match an IO String! Better would be if I could somehow write an IO String -> IO Char wrapper for head. I'm also confused as to why I can write: readFile "/tmp/foo" >>= putStr to print out the contents of a file but, in ghci, let x = readFile "/tmp/foo" putStr x ...doesn't work. Then again, I'm also confused by the way that Simon Thompson's book says that, (>>=) :: IO a -> (a -> IO a) -> IO a which I think might be a misprint for, (>>=) :: IO a -> (a -> IO b) -> IO b ...? I'm not sure if I've explained enough of my confusion that a succinct, helpful response not mentioned in what I've read so far can be easily given. I guess that my problem is that I had initially imagined that the prefix 'IO' appears as a magical tainting of any data that could depend on the result of some IO action. However, I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm quite wrong in this. I'd like to be able to manipulate IO Strings as if they were just strings that I can't forget came from IO, but I'm guessing now that things aren't that simple - they really are quite different to strings, yet I want to avoid resorting to unsafePerformIO. The really annoying thing is that all the monad examples I've read so far have made perfect sense to me. (-: What I'm really hoping is that a simple answer as to how best to arrange my IO String -> IO Char (or IO [a] -> IO a) version of head will somehow resolve a lot of my confusion. For instance, maybe I have to somehow write an 'action' version of head that I apply with the help of >>= ? -- Mark