Hello Bill, Wednesday, December 21, 2005, 6:38:33 PM, you wrote: BW> PS: While looking over my post it occurred to me that the issue is at BW> least as much methodological as it is linguistic. So I ask: Does BW> Haskell stand far enough apart from other programming languages to BW> warrant adapting standard methodological principles to it? Is there an BW> identifiable "Haskell Way"? as the man, who learned Haskell just year ago, and written large enough imperative program in Haskell (you can see it at http://freearc.narod.ru), i can answer both "yes" and "no". yes, Haskell really changes the way i program. no, it not diverges from the standard methodology - it forces to use it! :) any real program uses global variables, side-effects of functions, manually controlled sharing of data and so on. imagine programming in language which just don't support any provision for those tricks well, Haskell implementations de-facto supports such tricks, but they are considered as "bad programming style" and can lead to problems with optimized compilation, so you will aspire to avoid them as much as possible. you will need to decide beforehand for each function, whether it will have side effects or will be pure (although you of course may change your solution, whis will require to edit all functions which directly or indirectly call it, because function with side effects cannot be called inside pure function) you will need to learn programming techniques, which can be used in reliable way instead of forbidden unreliable ones - such as implicit parameters and using large structure to pass through the many levels of calls all data needed for these functions you will become an expert in organizing cycles via recursion ay least, you must try :) even if Haskell is not useful as real programming language, you at least will improve your programming style ;) -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:bulatz@HotPOP.com