I encountered the following issue last night. Writing a program like this: main = do putStr "> " x <- getLine putStr x behaves as expected in hugs and ghci (first prints "> ", then waits for input, then prints the input). However, when compiling and running an executable via ghc, the behavior was very different. I saw a blank console screen and when I typed something it was echoed back to me (as in "> 25") only after I hit enter. This is trivially fixed by flushing: main = do putStr "> " hFlush stdout x <- getLine putStr x or by turning off buffering. Is this the intended behavior? This problem does not appear when using putStrLn (as it flushes automatically) and is quite distracting to newbies. To me it looks like this behavior is at odds with something one can reasonably expect and bufferring should be turned off by default. What do you guys think? Thanks, - Slava.