I just tried this in ghci-7.0.3: ghci> nubBy (>=) [1,2,3,4] [1] Think about what this is doing: it is excluding 2 from the list because 2 >= 1, rather than including it because 1 >= 2 fails. I think an important convention when it comes to higher order functions on lists is that to the extent which is possible, the function parameters take elements from the list (or things computed from those) in the order in which they occur in the original list. If we reimplement it in the obvious way: ghci> let nubBy f [] = []; nubBy f (x:xs) = x : filter (not . f x) (nubBy f xs) ghci> nubBy (>=) [1,2,3,4] [1,2,3,4] I'm aware that the Report (strangely!) explicitly leaves the behaviour of nubBy unspecified for functions which are not equivalence relations, but the behaviour given by the Report implementation (the opposite of the current behaviour in GHC) is useful and desirable nonetheless. I'm sure I've written about this before. I'm not entirely sure what happened to the previous thread of discussion about this, but it just came up again for me, and I decided that I was sufficiently irritated by it to post again. Another thing perhaps worth pointing out is that the parameters to mapAccumR have always been backwards (compare it with foldr). Few enough people use this function that I'm fairly sure we could just change it without harm. - Cale