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