Talk:Strict programming language

Common Lisp

The article lists Common Lisp as a strict programming language. I am under the impression that Common Lisp functions are strict, but Common Lisp macros are not. Do I understand correctly?

As far as I can tell, macros are not directly related to strictness. Strictness relates to evaluation strategy, but macros are without evaluation strategy, as they are meta-evaluated. In effect, a macro can be used to change the evaluation strategy, so you can achieve macros that behave non-strictly.

Hardware optimized for strict languages?

"All hardware architectures in common use are optimized for strict languages, so the best compilers for non-strict languages produce slower code than the best compilers for strict languages." Is there a reference for this? In what way are common hardware architectures optimized for strict languages? — Chris Page 15:47, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, I've heard it in the form that all machine architectures would be optimized for C, which of course is a strict language. It could be easier to find references for what common hardware is missing from the lazy language point of view. --TuukkaH 16:36, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

So, here's the thing — there's no such think as a hardware thunk (at this point), so one could claim that hardware is optimized for languages without thunks. Not that it really matters, though; strict programming language, lazy evaluation, and eager evaluation all seem to have been created by people advocating a particular POV, and they've become essentially a forum for debating the two (even though lazy evaluation and eager evaluation are really just overgeneralized notions about families of evaluation strategies). At some point I intend to clean them up a bit. --bmills 17:04, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]