"interact" behaves oddly if used interactively

Nicholas Nethercote njn25 at cam.ac.uk
Thu Oct 2 13:08:07 EDT 2003


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


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