Hi Robert, The first thing to mention is that Haskell uses linked-lists, not arrays as the "standard" list type structure, so [1,2] is actually a linked list. The next thing to note is that Haskell is *lazy*. It won't do work that it doens't have to. This means that you can return a linked list with all the lines in the file, but they won't actually be read til they are required. i.e. Haskell cleverly worries about all the "getting a next line as required" stuff, without you even noticing - it will read it line by line. A simple function that does some of what you want is:
parseFile :: FilePath -> IO [(String, [Int])] parseFile x = do src <- readFile x return (map parseLine (lines src))
parseLine :: String -> (String, [Int]) parseLine = for you to write :)
The other point is that Haskell linked lists have to have every element of the same type, so you can't have ["test",1] as a linked list, what you actually want is a tuple, written ("test",1) - a tuple is of fixed length and all elements can be of different type. Hope that helps, Neil