On Sep 15, 2006, at 10:56 PM, doug_arro wrote:
> Then I write the following statement in C:
>
> bar(foo(3));
>
> I know foo(3) is evaluated before the bar is called.
So, what would
> be the reasons for C and OCaml to choose different
evaluation
> orders? I am guessing it has to do with language
design. Any
> insight here will be highly appreciated.
Well, first of all, writing bor(foo(3)) [or just bar (foo
3)] in
ocaml also evaluates foo 3 then passes the result to bar.
As for the
evaluation order, I would think that a lot of that is
historical in
nature. Functional programming has long had function
application be
of high precedence and left associative (perhaps even back
to the
writings of Church -- I don't really know), and in every
paper I can
remember reading has introduced a special operator for
function
composition, so that foo bar 3 means (foo bar) 3, and foo .
bar 3
means foo(bar 3).
There may, of course, be other reasons. For example, this
thread [1]
discusses why the evaluation order of the arguments to ocaml
functions is undefined.
[1] http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2005/08/
e63da0e90ee230186d5aa78c6c4d18ab.en.html
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