Unsure about 'IO'

[Alex van Ballegooij]

Dear all,

We've been working on bulding an interpreter in haskell
and we seem to have encountered a problem.
At the end of the email I've pasted a minimal version of the program, 
that shows the error.

The problem is that we 'putStr' a prompt onto (unbuffered) stdout
and then read a line, process it and 'print' output, all very basic.

This is done in the function 'processline' and works fine is this 
function is used directly from 'main', however, if used from within 
the 'while' construct it fails.
In the 'while' context it appears that the 'getLine' is executed 
before the 'putStr' is (or perhaps stdout is not as 'unbuffered'
as we expect ?).

As all the functions in this example are sequenced in the context of
the IO monad, I guess that order of execution should be predefined,
right ?

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
just for information: we tested with GHC 5.02.1 and 5.02.2.

Kind regards,
Alex...

----
  import IO
  import Monad 

  notM :: Monad m => m Bool -> m Bool
  notM = liftM not

  processline :: IO ()
  processline = do putStr "prompt: " 
                   line <- getLine
                   putStrLn ("Read: " ++ line)

  while :: Monad m => m Bool -> m a -> m ()
  while t s = do b <- t
                 if(b)
                   then do { s; while t s; return () }
                   else do { return () }

  main :: IO ()
  main = do hSetBuffering stdout NoBuffering
            putStrLn "Single call:"
            processline
            putStrLn "Call from 'while' construct:"
            while (notM isEOF) (processline)