"Nick":
So, as I understand, choosing default laziness was just experimental design decision in order to answer the question: "how good lazy language can be". I am practically convinced, that lazy evaluation included in the _right_ places can be extremely useful. I didn't state the question as "strict vs lazy", my question is different - "default laziness with optional strict -vs- default strictness with optional lazy".
And sorry, but the question remains open.
=== Now, I AM SORRY, but this is a bit - not wishing to offend, nor to annoy anybody - of a totalitarian philosophy. The world of programming is very rich, you can find the languages and the paradigms you want, and you can always construct new ones. You have strict languages as Scheme or ML, with some possibilities to do lazy programming. Go ahead! (But you will pay a price. The laziness in Scheme introduced by the delay macro can produce a lot of inefficient code, much worse than coded at the base level). The question is NOT open. The question has been answered a long time ago in a liberal manner. You have both. You *choose* your programming approach. You choose your language, if you don't like it, you go elsewhere, or you produce another one, of your own. Haskell chose a particular schema, that implied a *very concrete* decision concerning the underlying abstract machine model, and the implementation. It is a bit frustrating reading over and over the complaints of people who never needed, so they dont appreciate laziness, who want to revert Haskell to strict. As if we were really obliged to live inside of a specific Iron Curtain, where only one paradigm is "legal". == There are other annoying discussions as well. For example, here rather rarely, since it is a dedicated list, but on the newsgroup of FP (which I read rarely) from time to time somebody *must* complain that there is another lazy language, Clean, not too distinct from Haskell, and this seems to be a waste of effort, - the Cleaners should join Haskell, and contribute to its development instead of making another one, redundant project. Eine Kirche, eine Sprache, eine Partei, ein Volk??? Horrible perspective. Jerzy Karczmarczuk