On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, hadley wickham wrote:

>>
>> And, to answer the specific question: Yes, R has lazy evaluation,
>> everywhere. Arguments are always evaluated if and when they are
>> needed.
>>
>
> But doesn't R has a rather limited force of lazy evaluation? - you
> have no control over it, apart from that arguments are evaluated
> lazily. This rather limited compared to other languages (no lazy
> lists etc)

I'd say that was a rather pure form.

However, Peter's statement is not quite true. R has several types of
functions, and I think he is referring to closures, the functions written
in R itself. The argument handling in the built-in functions (primitive
and .Internal) is different, and they will often evaluate all the
arguments whether needed or not.


--
Brian D. Ripley,            ripley@(protected)
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,         Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,              +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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