The Eager evaluation reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Eager evaluation

Eager evaluation is the evaluation model in most traditional programming languages.

In eager evaluation an expression is evaluated as soon as it gets bound to a variable. This is generally more efficient as a low-level strategy in simple programming languages, as it removes the need to build and manage intermediate data structures representing unevaluated expressions.

However, in more sophisticated programming languages, the low-level optimisation of forced eager evaluation is found to be disadvantageous over lazy evaluation. This is because it prevents the higher-level optimisations and greater expressiveness that can be obtained under the latter method, which generally allows the implementation of both lazy and eager semantics.

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• Graph reduction

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