In computer programming, lazy evaluation is the technique of delaying a computation until the result is required.
The benefits of lazy evaluation include: performance increases due to avoiding unnecessary calculations, avoiding error conditions in the evaluation of compound expressions, the ability to construct infinite data structures, and the ability to define control structures as regular functions rather than built-in primitives.
Languages th...
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In computer programming, lazy evaluation is the technique of delaying a computation until the result is required.
The benefits of lazy evaluation include: performance increases due to avoiding unnecessary calculations, avoiding error conditions in the evaluation of compound expressions, the ability to construct infinite data structures, and the ability to define control structures as regular functions rather than built-in primitives.
Languages that use lazy actions can be further subdivided into those that use a call-by-name evaluation strategy and those that use call-by-need. Most realistic lazy languages, such as Haskell, use call-by-need for performance reasons, but theoretical presentations of lazy evaluation often use call-by-name for simplicity.
The opposite of lazy actions is eager evaluation, also known as strict evaluation. Eager evaluation is the evaluation behavior used in most programming languages.
Lazy evaluation refers to how expressions are evaluated when they are...
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