First of all: I'm not sure if this question is allowed here. If not, I apologize I'm trying to solve the following problem: For each word in a text find the number of occurences for each unique word in the text. i've come up with the following steps to solve this: * remove all punctuation except for whitespace and make the text lowercase * find all unique words in the text * for each unique word, count the number of occurences. This has resulted in the following code: removePunctuation :: [Char] -> [Char] removePunctuation str = filter (\c -> elem c (['a'..'z'] ++ ['A'..'Z'] ++ ['\t', ' ', '\n'])) str process :: [Char] -> [String] process str = words (map toLower (removePunctuation str)) unique :: (Eq a) => [a] -> [a] unique [] = [] unique (x:xs) = [x] ++ unique (filter (\s -> x /= s) xs) occurenceCount :: (Eq a) => a -> [a] -> Int occurenceCount _ [] = 0 occurenceCount x (y:ys) | x == y = 1 + occurenceCount x ys | otherwise = occurenceCount x ys occurenceCount' :: [String] -> [String] -> [(String, Int)] occurenceCount' [] _ = [("", 0)] occurenceCount' (u:us) xs = [(u, occurenceCount u xs)] ++ occurenceCount' us xs Please remember i've only been playing with Haskell for three afternoons now and i'm happy that the above code is working correctly. However i've got three questions: 1) occurenceCount' [] _ = [("", 0)] is plain ugly and also adds a useless tuple to the end result. Is there a better way to solve this? 2) I'm forcing elements into a singleton list on two occasions, both in my unique function and in my occurenceCount' function. Once again this seems ugly and I'm wondering if there is a better solution. 3) The whole process as i'm doing it now feels pretty imperatively (been working for years as a Java / PHP programmer). I've got this feeling that the occurenceCount' function could be implemented using a mapping function. What ways are there to make this more "functional"? -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/-Newbie--What-to-improve-in-my-code-tp29156025p2915602... Sent from the Haskell - Haskell-Cafe mailing list archive at Nabble.com.