I was under the impression that operations performed in monads (in this case, the IO monad) were lazy. (Certainly, every time I make the opposite assumption, my code fails :P .) Which doesn't explain why the following code fails to terminate: iRecurse :: (Num a) => IO a iRecurse = do recurse <- iRecurse return 1 main = (putStrLn . show) =<< iRecurse Any pointers to a good explanation of when the IO monad is lazy? === The long story === I wrote a function unfold with type signature (([a] -> a) -> [a]), for generating a list in which each element can be calculated from all of the previous elements. unfold :: ([a] -> a) -> [a] unfold f = unfold1 f [] unfold1 :: ([a] -> a) -> [a] -> [a] unfold1 f l = f l : unfold1 f (f l : l) Now I'm attempting to do the same thing, except where f returns a monad. (My use case is when f randomly selects the next element, i.e. text generation from markov chains.) So I want unfoldM1 :: (Monad m) => ([a] -> m a) -> [a] -> m [a] My instinct, then, would be to do something like: unfoldM1 f l = do next <- f l rest <- unfoldM1 f (next : l) return (next : rest) But that, like iRecurse above, doesn't work.