[Haskell-cafe] Re: evaluate vs seq

Lennart Augustsson wrote:

No, you were right the first time. :) The denotational semantics is the important one. Haskell can be executed by other means than graph reduction. (That's why the report says a "non-strict" rather than "lazy" language.) Peculiar language constructs may allow you to tell the difference, but then they are highly dubious (and like all dubious things, they should be in the IO monad :) ).

You suggest that (evaluate) or something else actually can tell me the difference? That would be interesting. And what alternatives (besides call by name without sharing) are there? I always think lazy evaluation is space and time optimal. Regards, apfelmus