This paper presents a novel approach to strictness analysis called abstract demand propagation, approach developed for the implementation of lazy functional programming languages on parallel machines. Although some work on strictness analysis using demand propagation has been done before, the present work is original in that it gives a precise interpretation of the notions of demands and demand propagation using an exact nonstandard denotational semantics. The intuition behind this semantics is that it represents a form of inverse computation, i.e., it determines the least amount of information needed to produce at least some required (demanded) result. Viewing demand propagation as a form of inverse computation allows to establish the soundness of our non-standard semantics by formally relating it with the standard semantics. In order to define a compile-time analysis based on demand propagation, safety and termination must be ensured. This is done by defining an abstract interpreta...