On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 12:08:07PM +0100, Nicholas Nethercote wrote:I agree.
This is because strict evaluation is always easy to understand.
Lazy/non-strict evaluation can be non-intuitive/confusing/surprising, even
for people who are used to it.
what is easy or confusing and what becomes intuitive is learned and depends a lot on background..
... IMHO lazy semantics can become just as intuitive and easy
as strict or mathematical semantics.
John
I once got confused by strict evalution, even though I had never seen a lazy functional language.
This happened when I was exposed to Standard ML as an undergraduate student. Before then, I had been learning programming using imperative languages like Pascal and Modula-2. One if the things I liked in SML was the conciseness offered by if-then-else *expressions*, e.g.,
fun fac n = if n=0 then 1 else n*fac(n-1)
as compared to the more verbose if-then-else *statements* I had used in other languages. But then I had they idea that I could do the same in Module-2 simply by defining an if-then-else function!
PROCEDURE IfThenElse(b:BOOLEAN; t,e:INTEGER):INTEGER; BEGIN IF b THEN RETURN t ELSE RETURN e END END IfThenElse;
PROCEDURE fac(n:INTEGER):INTEGER; BEGIN RETURN IfThenElse(n=0,1,fac(n-1)) END fac;
But I was surprised to notice that this implementation of the factorial function looped. I soon realized what the problem was: the IfThenElse function is too strict! I was very disappointed...
So, for over ten years now, I have done most of my programming in lazy functional languages. I am sure I would run into occasional surprises if I were to switch back to a strict language.
-- Thomas H
"Delay is preferable to error." - Thomas Jefferson (3rd President of the United States)
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