RE: DSSSL side effect-freeness

[Paul Prescod <papresco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 28 Jan 1998, Frank A. Christoph wrote:
> So this is an argument for side effect-freeness?  OK, I see your point about
> being able to apply only part of the style spec.  I don't see what this has
> to do with the grove being distributed, though -- and I can't imagine
> distributed groves being a typical case anyway.

Distributedness just makes the grove seem bigger. :) :) Seriously, I 
wanted to emphasize not only the size, but the bandwidth requirements of 
applying the whole stylesheet to the whole grove. The DSSSL way requires 
a few cross-machine queries, but very little actual data will typically 
cross the net.

> So, assuming we've ruled out side effects, what is the argument against
> laziness?

Guessing:

1. Implementation simplicity.
2. Scheme compatibility.
3. Leaves open the door for side-effectful supersets (like Jade!) (debug ). 
4. It's what most programmers expect anyhow -- few of us get to use lazy 
languages so most don't "know what they are missing." For instance I had 
to think hard to come up with a situation where a lazy language would be 
better because I am so used to thinking in terms of eager ones. Most of 
the examples of lazy programming I see are counters and other things that 
I don't use much day-to-day or else that I automatically wrap in a lambda 
without thinking about it...

 Paul Prescod


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