Do-notation can be misleading

Consider the following function:

oddness :: Maybe Int
oddness = do
  let a = Just 1 :: Maybe Int
  b <- a
  return b

Perfectly fine, albeit contrived, redundant, etc. Bear with me. Now consider what happens if we change the value of a:

oddness :: Maybe Int
oddness = do
  let a = Nothing :: Maybe Int
  b <- a
  return b

This looks odd, because it looks like we're extracting the value from a into b, and then passing it to return - it looks like there's some Int we extract from Nothing, and calling return converts it back to Nothing.

But of course, we know that this do-notation desugars to something like:

oddness :: Maybe Int
oddness =
  let a = Nothing :: Maybe Int
  in a >>= \b -> return b

And recall the definition of (>>=) for Maybe:

instance  Monad Maybe  where
    (Just x) >>= k      = k x
    Nothing  >>= _      = Nothing

So what's happening here is that what's on the right of (>>=) remains unevaluated, and Nothing is the result. Mystery solved.