Quoth Nick, nevermore, > According to one guy's analogy: the Real World is strict - in order to > drink tea, you have to put the cattle on the fire, wait until water > boils, brew tea and then drink. Not the cattle is put on the fire, water > boils and the tea is brewed when you take the empty cup to start > drinking. :-)
I think the word you meant there is "kettle", since "cattle" are what get turned into burgers ;-) Still, the idea of water-boil-tea-brew happening by demand would probably save electricity in our energy-conscious world. Don't boil a full kettle for a single cuppa! > The question is the following: how big the gap between strict languages > with lazy constructs and Haskell? Does the default lazyness have > irrefutable advantage over default strictness? That kinda leads into thoughts of the Turing tar-pit, where everything is possible but hopelessly obfuscated by the constraints of the language. I think default laziness, to answer your actual question, has advantage in terms of thought process. It helps me consider things in terms of dependencies. To go back to the analogy: in the strict style it's very easy to boil the kettle and then let the water go cold. This is a waste of energy (CPU time, or whatever). So whether it's *computationally* more valuable, I don't know. But I find that it helps me to order my thoughts about what a problem *needs*. Cheers, D. -- Dougal Stanton _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
