[gmfawcett]

Monads do not impose an evaluation order in Haskell. Monads let you thread state between computations, but that state may be lazily evaluated out-of-order.

The belief that monads sequence IO operations is why new Haskell programmers have difficulty writing functions like "open file, read file contents, close file, and return contents". They assume the contents will be read before the file closes, and not when the contents are lazily evaluated up the call chain (leading to a "can't read closed file" error).