Here you go, then: -- little-endian sequence of bytes to arbitrary integral type integerWithBytes :: (Bits a, Integral a) => [Word8] -> a integerWi

Here you go, then: -- little-endian sequence of bytes to arbitrary integral type integerWithBytes :: (Bits a, Integral a) => [Word8] -> a integerWithBytes = foldr (\byte acc -> (acc `shiftL` 8) + fromIntegral byte) 0 At least, I'm pretty sure that's what the article was trying to do... I don't think this is some amazing showcase of Haskell; after all, the article includes a (working?) implementation in C++. But it does serve as a nice counterexample to the idea -- expressed elsewhere in the thread -- that being generic is necessarily a hugely painful or complicated thing.