[Haskell-cafe] Is lazyness make big difference?

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

nick.linker:
> 
>    Hi all,
>    (Another topic stolen from a Russian forum discussion).
>    As everyone know, there are lot of strict languages, that
>    have possibilities to "switch on" lazy evaluation when
>    needed.
>    But the examples that I saw on Haskell, there was not much
>    use of lazy evaluation, often there were just several lazy
>    points, and the rest could be done strictly without loss of
>    generality. For example, in finding primes:
> 

Some good examples are on the shootout:

   The lazily generated trees in particular,
        http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=binarytrees&lang=all

    (note the much smaller memory footprint)

    And here, a lazy infinite DNA sequence generator:

        http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=fasta&lang=ghc&id=2

    (the cycle alu part generates an infinite dna stream, which we then
    print only as much of as we need. Greatly simplifies the code).

-- Don