Complete this assignment with Team 1. You and your partner should each understand the answers to all the problems, so don't just split up the work.
Is Java eager or lazy? Write a Java program to determine the answer to this question. The same program, run under the two different regimes, should produce different results. You may use any Java features you want, but keep your program relatively short; we will penalize you for programs we consider excessively long or obfuscatory. (Tip: It’s possible to solve this problem with a program no more than a few dozen lines long.)
You must turn in both the source code to your program (in printed or written form) as well as an answer to the question of whether Java is eager or lazy, and an explanation of how your program determines this. That is, you should provide a brief and unambiguous answer (e.g., “Java is lazy”) followed by a description of what result one would obtain under each regime, along with a brief explanation of why that regime would generate that result.
In general, it would be a good idea to discuss your plan of attack with the course staff. This will help you avoid falling into a trap of measuring the wrong entity, and will improve your understanding of eagerness and laziness.
In our lazy interpreter, we identified three points in the language where we
need to force evaluation of expression closures (by invoking
strict): the function position of an application, the test
expression of a conditional, and arithmetic primitives. Doug Oord, a fairly
sedentary student, is rather taken with the idea of laziness. He suggests that
we can reduce the amount of code we need to write by replacing all invocations
of strict with just one. In the lazy interpreter, he removes all
instances of strict and replaces
[id (v) (lookup v env)]with
[id (v) (strict (lookup v env))]
Doug’s reasoning is that the only time the interpreter returns an expression closure is on looking up an identifier in the environment. If we force its evaluation right away, we can be sure no other part of the interpreter will get an expression closure, so removing those other invocations of strict will do no harm. Being lazy himself, however, Doug fails to reason in the other direction, namely whether this will result in an overly eager interpreter.
Is it possible to write a program that will produce different results under the original
interpreter and Doug’s? Let the interpreted language feature arithmetic,
first-class functions, with, if0, and rec
(even though these are not in out in-class lazy interpreter).
If so, hand in an example program and the result under each interpreter, and clearly identify which interpreter will produce each result. Be sure to compare this behavior against that of the lazy interpreter of the sort we’ve written in class rather than the behavior of Haskell! Note: it should not be difficult to construct test interpreters from your solution to the Extended Interpreter assignment and the code we give you in the textbook. You may use these to help you test your conjectures.
If it's not possible, defend why one cannot
exist, and then consider the same language with cons,
first, and rest added. Also, keep in mind that the
REPL is always a strictness point. If you were running your lazy interpreter
from DrScheme, you would type the following into the interactions pane:
> (strict (interp '{...} (mtSub)))
...
No lazy language in history has also had state operations (such as mutating the values in boxes, or assigning values to variables). Why not?
The best answer to this question would include two things: a short program (which we assume will evaluate in a lazy regime) that uses state, and a brief explanation of what problem the execution of this program illustrates. Please be sure to use the non-caching (ie, original) notion of laziness. If you present a sufficiently illustrative example (which needn’t be very long!), your explanation can be quite short.