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From: acha@CS.CMU.EDU (Anurag Acharya)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional
Subject: Applications for lazy functional languages
Message-ID: <ACHA.91Mar21112142@DRAVIDO.CS.CMU.EDU>
Date: 21 Mar 91 16:21:42 GMT
Sender: acha@dravido.soar.cs.cmu.edu
Distribution: comp
Organization: Carnegie Mellon University
Lines: 14


I am curious about the kind of applications that lazy functional languages
are suitable for. What can you do with such languages (in a natural and
elegant fashion) that you cannot similarly do with a strict language augmented
by a lazy type constructor ? For the sake of concreteness, what
can be done in these languages that cannot be done naturally and elegantly in 
SML augmented by a "lazytype" construct that allows declarations like the 
following:

lazytype 'a stream = LAZY_CONS of 'a * 'a stream | NULL

with appropriate lazy semantics.

anurag