[cap-talk] Understanding capabilities in a web-desktop setting

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 15:26 +0100, Ben Laurie wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 10:23 PM, Toby Murray
> <toby.murray at comlab.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> > I wasn't aware that E supported lazy evaluation. Is this an obtuse
> > reference to E's promise system? While this allows some sense of "data
> > driven" evaluation, I'd never thought of it as qualifying for "lazy
> > evaluation" in the traditional sense. I'm hoping someone can clarify
> > this point.
> 
> I was actually thinking about the mechanism which allows you to send a
> message but not wait for it to complete before continuing.

Ben: the term "lazy evaluation" means something else. I'm not sure that
I fully understand what E does here, but I imagine that it may be very
close to the Scheme DELAY and FORCE constructs, with the caveat that
these.

So perhaps this could be described as delayed evaluation rather than
lazy evaluation.

> because on reflection, the message ordering stuff is one
> of the coolest features.

Definitely!

shap