Delayed evaluation is used particularly in functional languages. When using delayed evaluation, an expression is not evaluated as soon as it gets bound to a variable, but when the evaluator is forced to produce the expression's value. Some programming languages delay evaluation of expressions by default, and some others provide functions or special syntax to delay evaluation. In Miranda and Haskell, evaluation of function arguments is delayed by default. In many other languages, evaluation can be delayed by explicitly suspending the computation using special syntax (as with Scheme's "delay" and "force") or, ...

See also:

Lazy evaluation, Lazy evaluation - Delayed evaluation

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