On the wiki page for Applicative Functors (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applicative_functor) a familiar characteristic of monads is quoted; that they "allow you to run actions depending on the outcomes of earlier actions". I feel comfortable with Functors and Applicative Functors, but I don't yet get that "extra power" that monads provide. An example immediately follows that quotation on the wiki: do text <- getLine if null text then putStrLn "You refuse to enter something?" else putStrLn ("You entered " ++ text) For simplicity's sake, I modified it to avoid using the IO monad; the "text" binding is now provided by the first parameter, and (=<<) is used due to its similarity to fmap: bar :: Monad m => m String -> m String bar as = (=<<) (\a -> if null a then return "nothing" else return "something") as This works fine, so bar ["Blah"] gives ["something"], and bar (Just "") gives ["nothing"]. But, I can get the same effect using a Functor (replacing (=<<) with fmap): bar2 :: Functor f => f String -> f String bar2 as = fmap (\a -> if null a then "nothing" else "something") as Can anyone help me out of the swamp? Cheers, Paul