| Everything else about Haskell is so great and well thought out (eg type | classes, no side effects, higher rank polymorphism, existentials) it seems a | pity to throw all this away just because of one unfortunate feature I thought it might be worth mentioning that GHC (well, the HEAD, which will become 6.6) supports "bang patterns". See http://haskell.galois.com/cgi-bin/haskell-prime/trac.cgi/wiki/BangPatter ns Bang patterns make it much more convenient to write a strict function. E.g f (x, !y) = ... is strict both in the pair (of course) but also in the second component of the pair, y. You can also use them in lets let !x = <rhs> in <body> which will evaluate <rhs> before <body>. It's an experimental feature, and I'm interested to know how useful, or otherwise, it turns out to be. Simon