Magnus Therning
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but you see a "natural" ordering in your haskell expressions, right?
Right.
However the compiler/interpreter has to choose a sequence in order to arrive at a result, since that's how today's computers work. (Choosing well can be seen as optimisation :-)
Right. Ah, I may see my confusion then - I do see a natural ordering in my Haskell expressions, and indeed evaluation order could be different so long as the end result is the same, but I don't find that different to imperative languages - I would expect modern compilers to reorder statements if they can get better results out of it without affecting the answer. (E.g., if I specify a set of assignments where some reordering leaves the answers unchanged, but clusters uses of values better so that the dataflow is such that they can stay in registers, I'd expect the compiler to go ahead - so even where I do specify evaluation order in C or whatever, I don't particularly expect the compiler to respect that in cases where I won't notice that it didn't.) -- Mark