Lazy Evaluation

First encountered this in the idea of Dask. Then, I saw this being used for Scala.

In programming language theory, lazy evaluation, or call-by-need,is an evaluation strategy which delays the evaluation of an expression until its value is needed (non-strict evaluation) and which also avoids repeated evaluations (sharing).

The benefits of lazy evaluation include:

• The ability to define control flow (structures) as abstractions instead of primitives.
• The ability to define potentially infinite data structures. This allows for more straightforward implementation of some algorithms.
• The ability to define partially-defined data structures where some elements are errors. This allows for rapid prototyping.

Lazy evaluation is also a thing in Eigen.

The most obvious example is through PyTorch.