[Haskell-cafe] I just don't get it (data structures and OO)

[Phlex]

Hello all,

I'm coming from the OO world, and there's something i don't quite 
understand in the way haskellers manipulate data (as all functional 
programmers i guess).

Let's say i have a deep nested data structure.
Universe containing galaxies, containing solar systems, containing 
planets, containing countries, containing inhabitants, containing 
...whatever.

Using the OO paradigm, once i get a reference to an inhabitant, i can 
update it quite easily (say by changing it's age), and that's the end of it.

On the other side, using the functional paradigm, it seems to me that 
the function i use in order to create a _new_ inhabitant with a 
different age will need to have knowledge of the country over it, the 
planet ..and so on up to the universe...as i need to update all these 
structures to reflect the change. This is pretty bad and most probably 
doesn't need to be like this.

So here I am hoping for you all to give me some pointers on how this is 
done "the functional way".

Thanks in advance
Sacha