OK, so I feel I understand monads fine. I regularly use Maybe, [] and IO, and I've even constructed a few monads of my own. But here's a question: what is the purpose of the MonadPlus class? Clearly it defines a binary operation over monadic values and an identity element for that operation. But... what is this supposed to *do*? (For example, (>>) has an almost identical signature to mplus. But presumably they don't both do the same thing...) What functionallity is this supposed to give you? [In a somewhat unrelated question... I saw some code the other day that used Either as if it were a monad. And yet, I don't see an instance given in the standard libraries - even though there should be one. I can see Functor (Either a), but not Monad (Either a) or even Monad (Either String)...]