On 11/6/07, Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+ocaml@mega-nerd.com> wrote:
> Christopher L Conway wrote:
>
> > On 11/6/07, Brian Hurt <bhurt@janestcapital.com> wrote:
> > >  Also, creating a lazy thunk in Ocaml is expensive (like 140+ clock cycles),
> > > while passing an argument into a function is cheap- and the common case will
> > > be that the argument won't need to be evaluated, just passed in.
> >
> > What does this mean? Did OCaml become non-strict while I wasn't looking?
>
> Ocaml is strict by default and optionally lazy.
>
> The code being discussed was this:
>
>     log (lazy (Printf.printf "%s" (awfully_long_computation ())))
>
> where everything inside
>
>     (lazy X)
>
> is lazy evaluated.

Yes, of course. But, if I understand correctly, Brian was arguing in favor of

   Printf.ifprinf "%s" (awfully_long_computation ())

and claiming that it was potentially more efficient than the lazy version.

Chris