I've started learning Haskell, and I'm going through all the tutorial material I can find - there's a lot of good stuff available. One thing I haven't found a really good discussion of, is practical examples of building monads. There's plenty of discussion of the IO monad, and the state monad, and a lot of good theory on monads, but although I've seen tantalising statements about how powerful the ability to define your own monads can be, but no really concrete examples - something along the lines of - here is problem X - this might be our first cut at coding it - we can abstract out this stuff, as a monad - see how the code looks now, how much cleaner it is (I've seen this type of model developing a state monad, but I'm looking for a more application-specific approach). Also, a lot of (non-IO) monad code I've seen seems to revolve around higher order features like monad combinators, which, while certainly powerful, still make my head explode. On the other hand, monadic IO feels entirely comprehensible, revolving round do-notation, and looking reassuringly sequential and imperative :-) Surely there are other uses of monads which can feel familiar to non-functional programmers? Otherwise, I'm still left with the (inaccurate, and unhelpful) impression that "IO is a badly integrated exception"... I don't know if the above makes sense. I've struggled with this for a while now, and haven't managed to express my confusion any more clearly - for which I apologise. I'd appreciate any pointers or explanations. FWIW, I've read (among other papers) "Why Functional Programming Matters", "A Gentle Introduction to Haskell", Hal Daume's "Yet Another Haskell Tutorial", Simon Peyton Jones' "Tackling the Awkward Squad", and "Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming". I don't claim to have digested all of this - indeed, there are probably many areas I've only skimmed - so pointers to areas in these documents I might have missed would be appreciated. On the other hand, pointers to papers I've missed altogether would also be gratefully received. Thanks in advance for any help, Paul. -- There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. -- Douglas Adams