I want to understand Haskell better by trying to stretch possibilities of Functor, Applicative, and Monad as much as possible and study how they behave. So in [*Learn You a Haskell*](http://learnyouahaskell.com/a-fistful-of-monads) there's an exercise to generate all possible moves for a knight from a given position on chessboard: moveKnight :: KnightPos -> [KnightPos] moveKnight (c,r) = filter onBoard [(c+2,r-1),(c+2,r+1),(c-2,r-1),(c-2,r+1) ,(c+1,r-2),(c+1,r+2),(c-1,r-2),(c-1,r+2) ] where onBoard (c,r) = c `elem` [1..8] && r `elem` [1..8] Now I thought to myself, wait a second, I can actually generate that list `[(c+2,r-1),(c+2,r+1),(c-2,r-1),(c-2,r+1),(c+1,r-2),(c+1,r+2),(c-1,r-2),(c-1,r+2)]` instead of hardcoding it. So this is how I did it with list comprehensions: invert x | x == 1 = 2 | x == 2 = 1 | otherwise = 0 moves = [(c `f` a, r `g` (invert a)) | c <- [6], r <- [2], f <- [(+), (-)], g <- [(+), (-)], a <- [1, 2]] -- generates: [(7,4),(8,3),(7,0),(8,1),(5,4),(4,3),(5,0),(4,1)] With applicative approach I don't know how to do it. The below code generates 2 times more elements, because it doesn't know, that if you increment/decrement by 1 on the left side, you must do it by 2 on the right side: [(,)] <*> ([(+), (-)] <*> [6] <*> [1, 2]) <*> ([(+), (-)] <*> [6] <*> [1, 2]) -- generates: [(7,7),(7,8),(7,5),(7,4),(8,7),(8,8),(8,5),(8,4), -- (5,7),(5,8),(5,5),(5,4),(4,7),(4,8),(4,5),(4,4)] My questions are: - How to implement the generation of such list with applicative style? - How to generalize it to arbitrary possible permutations? - What intuitions, insights and lessons can I get from this exercise? I know that this is a massively contrived situation, but they serve me as an exercise to understand language better.