• DOI:10.1007/3-540-45442-X_6
• Corpus ID: 10059915

Fine Control of Demand in Haskell

@inproceedings{Harrison2002FineCO,
  title={Fine Control of Demand in Haskell},
  author={William L. Harrison and Tim Sheard and James Hook},
  booktitle={MPC},
  year={2002}
}

• W. Harrison, T. Sheard, J. Hook
• Published in MPC 8 July 2002
• Computer Science

Functional languages have the ?-calculus at their core, but then depart from this firm foundation by including features that alter their default evaluation order. The resulting mixed evaluation--partly lazy and partly strict--complicates the formal semantics of these languages. The functional language Haskell is such a language, with features such as pattern-matching, case expressions with guards, etc., in troducing a modicum of strictness into the otherwise lazy language. But just how does Haskell differ from the lazy ?-calculus? We answer this question by introducing a calculational semantics for Haskell that exposes the interaction of its strict features with its default laziness.