How can I get nth element from a list?

Question

How can I access a list by index in Haskell, analog to this C code?

int a[] = { 34, 45, 56 };
return a[1];

Answer 1

The straight answer was already given: Use !!.

However newbies often tend to overuse this operator, which is expensive in Haskell (because you work on single linked lists, not on arrays). There are several useful techniques to avoid this, the easiest one is using zip. If you write zip ["foo","bar","baz"] [0..], you get a new list with the indices "attached" to each element in a pair: [("foo",0),("bar",1),("baz",2)], which is often exactly what you need.