I've been struggling with writing a parser that needs to parse include files within source files. So far I cannot get this to work (in reality to get work done I wrote a kludge that returns a list of include filenames to be run later in a pure IO function. I realized that this just amounted to creating my own half-assed monad system so I really don't want to use this approach). I have read the tutorials I could find on monad transformers but I still don't see what's going on. I'm using the Parsec parser library. Here's an simple example of what I've tried. I also tried using liftIO and got a message about needing to add an instance of MonadIO. This made more sense but the type of liftIO is baffling class Monad m => MonadIO m where liftIO :: IO a -> m a But how do you define this function? There is no constructor for "IO a" that you can "take apart". Anyway, here is the code that just uses lift. Keep in mind that the outer monad is just "GenParser Char st [Char]". I'm guessing this is wrong and I should have a transformer monad as the outer layer. But which one? and how to use it? pio = do { s <- many1 alphaNum; input <- lift (readFile s); return input; } go6 = runParser pio () "" "This is a test" ================================= ghc output from trying to load this is ================================= Couldn't match kind `* -> * -> *' against `(* -> *) -> * -> *' When matching the kinds of `GenParser Char :: * -> * -> *' and `t :: (* -> *) -> * -> *' Expected type: GenParser Char st Inferred type: t IO In a 'do' expression: lift (writeFile "Foo" s) ____________________________________________________________________________________ Fussy? Opinionated? Impossible to please? Perfect. Join Yahoo!'s user panel and lay it on us. http://surveylink.yahoo.com/gmrs/yahoo_panel_invite.asp?a=7