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.