BibTeX
@TECHREPORT{Führmann00thestructure,
author = {Carsten Führmann},
title = {The Structure of Call-by-Value},
institution = {},
year = {2000}
}
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Abstract
To my parents Understanding procedure calls is crucial in computer science and everyday pro-gramming. Among the most common strategies for passing procedure argu-ments (‘evaluation strategies’) are ‘call-by-name’, ‘call-by-need’, and ‘call-by-value’, where the latter is the most commonly used. While reasoning about procedure calls is simple for call-by-name, problems arise for call-by-need and call-by-value, because it matters how often and in which order the arguments of a procedure are evaluated. We shall classify these problems and see that all of them occur for call-by-value, some occur for call-by-need, and none occur for call-by-name. In that sense, call-by-value is the ‘greatest common denominator ’ of the three evaluation strategies. Reasoning about call-by-value programs has been tackled by Eugenio Moggi’s ‘computational lambda-calculus’, which is based on a distinction between ‘values’
