"I assume that this complaint was about transliteration into pure Haskell (whatever that may mean exactly). Clearly transliteration into full Haskell with actu

"I assume that this complaint was about transliteration into pure Haskell (whatever that may mean exactly). Clearly transliteration into full Haskell with actual mutability is possible." Ah, if you'd made that assumption explicit I would not have objected. I don't see anywhere the querent suggesting that his translation demand invoked any notion of purity. If it did, then certainly he was asking a harder question than he presented, although even in that case a naive translation could have trivially produced an O(m n lg(n)) solution and O(m^n) should quite reasonably be considered failure. I think the issue in the main is that relatively novice Haskell developers are likely to be the most eager to try and translate arbitrary code on demand in #haskell.