What is a monad?

Question

Having briefly looked at Haskell recently, what would be a brief, succinct, practical explanation as to what a monad essentially is?

I have found most expla

Answer 1

If I've understood correctly, IEnumerable is derived from monads. I wonder if that might be an interesting angle of approach for those of us from the C# world?

For what it's worth, here are some links to tutorials that helped me (and no, I still haven't understood what monads are).

• http://osteele.com/archives/2007/12/overloading-semicolon
• http://spbhug.folding-maps.org/wiki/MonadsEn
• http://www.loria.fr/~kow/monads/