Lenient evaluation is neither strict nor lazy

Abstract

What is a non-strict functional language? Is a non-strict language necessarily lazy? What additional expressiveness brings non-strictness, with or without laziness? This paper tries to shed some light on these questions.

First, in order to characterize non-strictness, different evaluation strategies are introduced: strict, lazy, and lenient. Then, using program examples, how these evaluation strategies differ from each other is examined, showing that non-strictness, even without laziness, allows a more general use of recursive definitions. We also report on a small experiment that we performed to examine how, in practice, laziness was used in a number of lazy benchmark programs.