You can do that. If you're getting an error, it's from a mistake on some other line. That said, you shouldn't write it that way. length requires a traversal of the entire list, so if the list is 1000 elements long it will take 1001 steps to compute that result when two steps would do. `length (take 2 a) == 1` would be a constant time way to get the result you want, although likely not the most elegant way to solve this exercise.