On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Thomas Johnsson wrote:
I'm convinced that if laziness (or call by name) were the norm in languages in general, then there would be similar traffic in lists like this one about the problems of strict evaluation -- and there would be a lot more of it, since strictness constrains the programming style a lot more!
You can divide "problems" into two areas... I can imagine people might complain on lists like this about strictness preventing them from taking a certain approach that laziness would allow. But I can't imagine they would complain about the problem of being confused... "this strict code evaluated immediately, what's going on?!" :) 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. N