[Haskell-beginners] cleanest way to unwrap a list?

[Christopher Howard]

Hi. Is the some generic, clean syntax to unwrap a nested list, modify
the value, and put it back together? Say, for example, I have the list
[[1,2],[3,4]] and want to add 1 to each inner element, resulting in
[[2,3],[4,5]].

After reading about the list monad, I was rather excited, because I
(mistakenly) thought something like this would work:

code:
--------
a = do b <- [[1,2],[3,4]]
       c <- b
       return (c + 1)
--------

That would be awesome, because I would be able to modify the list at
each level of unwrapping, while leaving the code very neat and readable.
However, what the above example actually does is produce a /single/ list
from the values:

code:
--------
*Main> a
[2,3,4,5]
--------

Obviously wishing won't change how the list monad works, but I thought
it might be worth asking if there is some other monad or syntactic trick
that does something along the lines of what I am looking for.

-- 
frigidcode.com
indicium.us

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