[Haskell-cafe] help understanding lazy evaluation

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Xavier,

Thursday, August 23, 2007, 3:08:25 AM, you wrote:

> I am learning Haskell with "Programming in Haskell" (an excellent  
> book BTW).

scheme of lazy evaluation called "graph reduction"

you may consider it as repetitive replacing right parts of function
definitions with their left parts. as far as some part of graph isn't
required to compute final result, it's abandoned and not computed down
to final value

simple example: consider evaluation of "head [1..]". [1..] may be
represented with the following recursive function:

list n = n:list n+1

so we have "head (list 1)" where head defined as

head (x:_) = x

let's evaluate expression:

head (list 1) =>
head (1:list 2) =>
1

as you see, "list 2" was just dropped during evaluation. the same
applies to your case - as far as "==" found different values in list,
it skips its further evaluation, so rest of divisors remains
uncalculated

-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com