> What do you mean here by "higher-order"? Procedures as first-class values that you can store in variables, pass as arguments to other procedures, etc. > And

> What do you mean here by "higher-order"? Procedures as first-class values that you can store in variables, pass as arguments to other procedures, etc. > And, by "intrinsic", do you mean that "the language does that, but the programmer doesn't have to do anything to make it happen, or even know"? Yes. Although, IMO, programmers benefit from knowing it, for more or less the same reasons civil engineers benefit from knowing the laws of nature. > If so, doesn't this contradict your answer to smaddox? No. Monads, as abstract type constructors, are already hardcoded into the result type of every computation. (This is the difference between, say, an int like “2”, and a computation that produces an int like “1 + 1” or “fix (\x -> x + 1)”.) So hardcoded, in fact, that there doesn't have to be syntax for it, because there's no way you can not say it.