>when i'm fleshing out ideas or trying a new approach, i don't need everything to be consistent---just the bit i'm working on I would advise you to use ghci -

>when i'm fleshing out ideas or trying a new approach, i don't need everything to be consistent---just the bit i'm working on I would advise you to use ghci - a REPL for Haskell. That way you work on some little subproblem and when you succeed you can spread your changes over complete program. I prefer to do just that, relying on compiler in small and large.