meaning of call by
1. call-by-name 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 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.
Related Words
call-by-name | call-by-need | call-by-reference |
