The semantics of lazy (and industrious) evaluation
Robert Cartwright, James Donahue · 1982
Since the publication of two influential papers on lazy evaluation in 1976 [Henderson and Morris, Friedman and Wise], the idea has gained widespread acceptance among language theoreticians—particularly among the advocates of “functional programming” [Henderson80, Backus78]. There are two basic reasons for the popularity of lazy evaluation. First, by making some of the data constructors in a functional language non-strict, it supports programs that manipulate “infinite objects” such as recursively enumerable sequences, which may make some applications easier to program. Second, by delaying evaluation of arguments until they are actually needed, it may speed up computations involving ordinary finite objects.