Hi, I don't think I already presented myself; I'm Nicolas, a 23y french student, trying to learn and use haskell. I've been using C for years, for all sort of tasks, and am quite comfortable with it. I'm also using it 40h a week in my internship for network systems, so I kind of know how to use it. I discovered Haskell some monthes ago, bought `Real World Haskell', quickly read, and enjoyed it. So now I'd want to use it for a small project of mine, a simple multiplayer roguelike based on telnet. I wrote a minimal server in C, and it took me a few hours. Now I'm thinking about doing the same in Haskell, and I'm in trouble. I don't really know how to map my ideas in haskell code. For example, a character can cast spells, so I'd have something like this in C: struct hashtable spells; struct character { int n_spells; struct spell **spells; }; I thought I could do something like this in haskell: spells = Data.Map.Map Int Spell data Character = Character { charSpells :: [Int] } But now I don't know how to dynamically add new spells (new spells can be created in my gameplay). Since I can't assign a new value to the `spells' variable (Data.Map.insert returns a new map), I just don't know where to go. I have the same problem for a bout every problem. I love writing pure functions in haskell, but as soon as I try to write some code involving states or side effects, I can't write a line. I just wanted a 2d array to store a zone, for example, dead simple in C, but this kind of link http://greenokapi.net/blog/2009/03/10/rough-grids-in-haskell make me shiver. Point is, I'd like to use haskell, but I don't know how, it seems totally alien. How did you manage to change the way you map ideas to code, from imperative to pure functional ? Thank you. Regards, -- Nicolas Martyanoff http://codemore.org khaelin@gmail.com