order-only prerequisites don't behave as I'd have expected after reading the documentation

[Stefano Lattarini]

The GNU make 3.82 manual reads:

    Normally, this is exactly what you want: if a target's prerequisite
    is updated, then the target should also be updated.

    Occasionally, however, you have a situation where you want to impose
    a specific ordering on the rules to be invoked without forcing the
    target to be updated if one of those rules is executed.

But if I write a makefile like this:

    ALL = a b c d
    default:
        echo Specify a target: $(ALL); exit 1
    .PHONY: $(ALL)
    $(ALL):
        @echo $@
    a: | b
    b: | c
    c: | d

then I get:

    $ make a # Not what I expected, but what actually happened.
    d
    c
    b
    a

which is not what I'd have expected reading the documentation above; what
I would have expected was that "a" alone would be run:

    $ make a # What I expected, but did not happen.
    a

OTOH, if I had invoked more than one prerequisite at the same time, I'd
have expected the ordering among them to be respected, like this:

    $ make b a c # What would I expected.
    c
    b
    a

Is this a bug in make, in its documentation, or it's just me
misunderstanding something?

Regards,
  Stefano