Alexander Berntsen indicates that he has a branch all ready to go. Henning Thienemann seems to prefer the term viewL. Alexander says that Edward Kmett says that uncons/unsnoc is the more common term. Personally, I find uncons and unsnoc to be more intuitive names. Details: uncons :: [a] -> Maybe (a, [a]) uncons [] = Nothing uncons (a:as) = Just (a,as) -- Henning's implementation of "viewR", renamed, looks like unsnoc :: [a] -> Maybe ([a], a) unsnoc = foldr (\x -> Just . forcePair . maybe ([],x) (mapFst (x:))) Nothing I wonder if it would be possible to tease that apart a bit to get the maybe out of the loop, which I think might be prettier. The really tricky part of unsnoc is making it lazy enough—messing around with it a bit suggested that it's very easy to mess up the pair lifting. The tough rule seems to be this mouthful, if I'm not mistaken: unsnoc (xs ++ (y : _|_)) = Just (xs ++ _|_, _|_) David