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)