[Haskell-cafe] Question on Exercise from SOE

[Nathan Weston]

I am learning haskell (and functional programming), from the School of 
Expression book.

There's an exercise to rewrite the following function (for computing the area 
of a polygon) using map, fold, etc:

data Shape = Polygon [Vertex]

area (Polygon (v1:vs))  = polyArea vs
    where polyArea             :: [Vertex] -> Float
	  polyArea (v2:v3:vs') =  triArea v1 v2 v3 + polyArea (v3:vs')        
          polyArea _           =  0			       


My first thought is to use fold here, since this function accumulates a result 
as it traverses the list. But fold consumes one element of the list at a 
time, while area needs to examine the first three elements of the list, and 
consume two of them at a time.
Is there a more general alternative to fold? Or is there some trick I'm 
missing here?

Thanks,
Nathan