Abstract Reduction Strategies for Declarative Programming

This paper surveys reduction or evaluation strategies for functional and functional logic programs. Reasonable reduction strategies for declarative languages must be efficiently implementable to be useful in practice. On the other hand, they should also support the programmers to write programs in a declarative way ignoring the influence of the evaluation strategy to the success of a computation as good as possible. We review existing reduction strategies along these lines and discuss some aspects for further investigation.