Kind and Generous Haskellers: I am ensnared in a briar patch of infinite lists and Random gnerators trying to use laziness to advantage. Here's my code: ----------------- 8< -------------------- import Control.Applicative import Control.Monad import Control.Monad.Random import Control.Monad.State import System.Random.Mersenne.Pure64 -- Specialized iterator for running actions in Rand monad, to thread -- the generator. The idea is that the action returns a finite list -- of random values and iterateR lazily creates an infinite list of -- values. iterateR act = do gen <- get let (as,gen') = runRand act gen put $! gen' (as ++) <$> iterateR act -- A simple example of a finite action something :: (RandomGen g) => Int -> Int -> Rand g [Int] something n m = sequence . replicate n $ getRandomR (m,m+9) run1 = evalState (take 10 <$> (iterateR (something 2 0))) $ pureMT 42 run2 = evalState (take 10 <$> (iterateR (something 2 0) >> iterateR (something 3 10))) $ pureMT 42 run3 = evalState (take 10 <$> (iterateR (something 2 0) >>= iterateR . (something 3 . head))) $ pureMT 42 ------------------- >8 ---------------------- Evaluating run1 works fine (ghci 10.3): *Main> run1 [1,9,5,3,6,9,1,5,1,8] Evaluating run2 or run3 loops and quickly exhausts the heap. (Using Control.Monad.State.Strict causes stack overflow, though) The motivation for iterateR is to be able to have the ultimate consumer determine how many random values to force, but still have a single random generator used throughout the computation. My intuition tells me that since the infinite list is produced in finite batches, the generator shouldn't be tangled up in an infinite list such as produced by MonadRandom's getRandoms, but I only have a pink belt in Haskell-fu. Can anyone explain why this is looping or point out a better way to generate an arbitrary-length random list while still being able to reuse the generator? (I'd rather not use split since this generator doesn't support it and its of dubious soundness.) Dale Jordan