applicative order reduction

programming An evaluation strategy under which an

expression is evaluated by repeatedly evaluating its leftmost

innermost redex. This means that a function's arguments are

evaluated before the function is applied. This method will

not terminate if a function is given a non-terminating

expression as an argument even if the function is not strict

in that argument. Also known as call-by-value since the

values of arguments are passed rather than their names. This

is the evaluation strategy used by ML, Scheme, Hope and

most procedural languages such as C and Pascal.

See also normal order reduction, parallel reduction.

(1995-01-25)