call-by-name

C c

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- US Pronunciation
- US IPA

- US Pronunciation
- US IPA

Definitions of call-by-name word

noun Technical meaning of call-by-name (reduction) (CBN) (Normal order reduction, leftmost, outermost reduction). An argument passing convention (first provided by ALGOL 60?) where argument expressions are passed unevaluated. This is usually implemented by passing a pointer to a thunk - some code which will return the value of the argument and an environment giving the values of its free variables. This evaluation strategy is guaranteed to reach a normal form if one exists. When used to implement functional programming languages, call-by-name is usually combined with graph reduction to avoid repeated evaluation of the same expression. This is then known as call-by-need. The opposite of call-by-name is call-by-value where arguments are evaluated before they are passed to a function. This is more efficient but is less likely to terminate in the presence of infinite data structures and recursive functions. Arguments to macros are usually passed using call-by-name. 1
noun call-by-name (programming) An evaluation strategy whereby an argument to a function is evaluated each time its value is used in the function, and is not evaluated at all if its value is never used. 0

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Parts of speech for Call-by-name

noun

adjective

verb

adverb

pronoun

preposition

conjunction

determiner

exclamation

Full grammatical hierarchy of Call-by-name

See also

All definitions of call-by-name

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