More haste, less speed: lazy versus eager evaluation

Authors:
Richard Bird;Geraint Jones;Oege De Moor
Affiliations:
Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK;Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK;Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK
Venue:
Journal of Functional Programming
Year:
1997

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Abstract

Nicholas Pippenger has recently given a problem that, under two simple restrictions, can be solved in linear time by an impure Lisp program, but requires Ω(n log n) steps to be solved by any eager pure Lisp program. By showing how to solve the problem in linear time with a lazy functional program, we demonstrate that – for some problems at least – lazy evaluators are strictly more powerful than eager ones.