Can you do dropWhile in terms of foldr? I don't see how. If you are really keen, you might want to try altering the "working backwards with tuples" version into one which is properly lazy (many people who read the paper pointed out the omission).
you might want to mention the story of the predecessor function in church numerals (where data structures are represented as their right folds, and the predecessor function goes against the grain of that recursion, but can be defined using pairing/returning functions)? for some history/anecdotes: The Impact of the Lambda Calculus in Logic and Computer Science, Barendregt, Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 1997, section 2, paragraph 2 http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/barendregt97impact.html for the tupling trick applied to dropWhile and primitive recursion, Graham's tutorial has already been mentioned: A tutorial on the universality and expressiveness of fold Graham Hutton. Journal of Functional Programming, 1999, section 4 http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/bib.html#fold claus