From the Haskell snippet, f is just "map read" specialized for lists of Integers, so inlining it would read like this : let list = map read (words contents)

From the Haskell snippet, f is just "map read" specialized for lists of Integers, so inlining it would read like this : let list = map read (words contents) The equivalent Python is basically this: list = [int(word) for word in contents.split()] I'm just writing this for the benefit of others here.