One source for confusion around lists is that the list monad is often used to model non-determinism, rather than just "many things". If you're thinking about non-determinism, a list is akin to a container of one item when you don't precisely know which item it is, but do know it's one of zero or more candidates.
The most widely recognised example, IMO, would be monadic parser combinators. "A parser for a thing, is a function from a string, to a list of pairs of strings and things."
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One source for confusion around lists is that the list monad is often used to model non-determinism, rather than just "many things". If you're thinking about non-determinism, a list is akin to a container of one item when you don't precisely know which item it is, but do know it's one of zero or more candidates.
The most widely recognised example, IMO, would be monadic parser combinators. "A parser for a thing, is a function from a string, to a list of pairs of strings and things."