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That is great. In my school we only had a class with Ocaml, not quite as mind blowing since it didn't have lazy evaluation, monads, type classes, or any of the other crazy distinctive things in Haskell that don't exist in ML-style languages.

Hopefully they cover the theory behind Haskell as much as the practical side of it.

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ML's first-class modules let you achieve many of the same things as type classes. In fact, a lot of people in the Haskell community would like something a bit closer to ML (in other words, more powerful) in this regard.

Monads can be formulated in any language with first-class functions. Monadic I/O is more distinctively Haskellish, and of course Haskell has syntactic sugar to make using them easier, but as a tool and a concept they're far from unique to Haskell.

> Monads can be formulated in any language with first-class functions.

Yes, though they only really make sense if you also have static typing, and polymorphism by return type also helps.

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