Very much inspired by lazy functional programming :) Because of the inherent laziness in the language, Haskell's list type works like this. Except better: if y

Very much inspired by lazy functional programming :) Because of the inherent laziness in the language, Haskell's list type works like this. Except better: if you walk over a list, examining its values, you have to call those functions; but Haskell then stores (memoises) those results, so that the second time you walk over the list, the functions don't need to be called again since that initial part is already evaluated. This is what functional programming people refer to when they say call-by-need. This is particularly helpful if the computation to produce the list is expensive. For example, (weird example, sorry) a list of every 1000th prime number. That gets moderately more expensive as you look at bigger and bigger numbers, so it would be good not to do that many times if you can help it.