Another interesting example of the x = f x use : coins = [1,2,5,10,20,50,100,200] beautiful = foldl (\without p -> let (poor,rich) = splitAt p without with = poor ++ zipWith (++) (map (map (p:)) with) rich in with ) ([[]] : repeat []) I don't remember who wrote this code (I rewrote it from memory since it impressed me quite a bit), but it's a very fast and beautiful (in my eyes at least) solution to the "menu" problem : (beautiful coins !! 200) would give you all the set of coins you could use to pay for 200, in less than 40ms on my computer... But, even more trivial... You use this all the time when you define recursive function, you know ? You would need to add a "rec" keyword to the language if you disallowed this. Myself I'm a big fan of the point-free style (to a limit) and find that it scale very well indeed when you begin to name the combination of functions you want to use. -- Jedaï