In my case, I thought the laziness could be more crazy, where you created a function that would evaluate to a FileHandle, but until you actually evaluate that function, you don't have a FileHandle.

So, depending on just how "lazy" the program truly is, sure you passed it something that unwraps a Maybe, but only once you actually go to use it. That make sense?

Consider this fun bit of nonsense scala

    def foo(x:=>String): Unit = {
        println("Hello")
        println(x)
    }

If I call this as "foo(None.get)", then it will print "Hello" before barfing. In fact, if I didn't evaluate x, it wouldn't even barf. I had thought the laziness of Haskel was that ++. (Meaning I thought if I stored x off to another also lazy reference, it wouldn't barf right away.)

To make that a little more clear of what I meant, some even more amusing scala.

    class Foo(x: => String) {
        def happy = println("Doing good.")
        def sad = println(x)
    }

If I create something with "new Foo(None.get)", I can call happy on this object all day long. If I ever call sad, I get an exception.