I'll agree about the weird Haskell indentation rules. But do notation really is just syntactic sugar for a chain of >> and >>= applications (plus "fail" for in

I'll agree about the weird Haskell indentation rules. But do notation really is just syntactic sugar for a chain of >> and >>= applications (plus "fail" for invalid pattern matches). It's not usually pretty or understandable to write it that way, but it's a very simple translation. If the people you talked to couldn't explain it to you, I think they maybe didn't understand it well themselves.