>You say it's used all the time -- so how about you give an example of a "lazy" solution to a problem in, say, C?
but I was just reading that old thread now, so replying here.
short-circuit evaluation would be an example in C, because the programmer can ask the compiler to do something, but at run-time it won't do it if the results aren't necessary - it just won't execute despite the programmer explicitly writing those instructions.
e.g. in the condition if (is_prime(a) && is_something_hard_to_compute(a)) then even though you're calling the function is_something_hard_to_compute() about a, at run-time if it's not necessary for the result, then purely out of laziness it won't get called. (i.e. if the first test returns false.)
