catflap.org Online Dictionary Query

  eager evaluation
       
          Any evaluation strategy where evaluation of some or all
          function arguments is started before their value is required.
          A typical example is call-by-value, where all arguments are
          passed evaluated.  The opposite of eager evaluation is
          call-by-need where evaluation of an argument is only started
          when it is required.
       
          The term "{speculative evaluation" is very close in meaning
          to eager evaluation but is applied mostly to parallel
          architectures whereas eager evaluation is used of both
          sequential and parallel evaluators.
       
          Eager evaluation does not specify exactly when argument
          evaluation takes place - it might be done fully speculatively
          (all redexes in the program reduced in parallel) or may be
          done by the caller just before the function is entered.
       
          The term "eager evaluation" was invented by Carl Hewitt and
          Henry Baker  and used in their paper ["The
          Incremental Garbage Collection of Processes", Sigplan Notices,
          Aug 1977.
          ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/Futures.html)" rel="nofollow">(ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/Futures.html)].  It was
          named after their "eager beaver" evaluator.
       
          See also conservative evaluation, lenient evaluation,
          strict evaluation.
       
          (1994-12-22)