This is probably an off-topic question, but I can't think of a better forum to ask it: does the existance of monads imply laziness in a language, at least at the monadic level? Consider the following: a purely functional, eagerly evaluated programming language, that uses monads to encapsulate the awkward squad. In this programming language, a program generates an IO monad whose encapsulating computation performs side effecting affections- it writes to stdout, say. But this generated monad never has it's value evaluated- the monad is tossed away uninspected. Does the side effect happen? If the answer is at least potientially "no", then monads are lazily evaluated, and thus monads imply laziness (at least at the monadic level). On the other hand, if the answer is "yes", then monads do not imply laziness. Thanks, Brian