I've butted into this problem multiple times, so I thought it's finally time to get a good solution. I don't even have the terminology to describe the issue, so I'll just post the code I'm annoyed with and hope someone understands what I mean. import Control.Monad.Random import System.Random data Marital = Single | Married | Divorced deriving (Enum, Bounded, Show) randomEnum :: (Enum a, Bounded a, RandomGen g) => Rand g a randomEnum = do let minb = minBound maxb = maxBound randVal <- getRandomR (fromEnum minb, fromEnum maxb) return $ head [toEnum randVal, minb, maxb] -- if I do the obvious thing (return $ toEnum randVal) I get funny errors main = do stdGen <- newStdGen let marital = evalRand randomEnum stdGen :: Marital putStrLn $ "Random marital status: " ++ show marital Any help is appreciated. Thanks! Michael