Fair enough. Though as later comments point out, constructing a 1tb object is probably a better failure case for functional languages. It would also be fairly e

Fair enough. Though as later comments point out, constructing a 1tb object is probably a better failure case for functional languages. It would also be fairly easy to avoid if the True on the lhs could be evaluated quickly so you could abort the second calculation. That kind of code is only valid in strict languages because of short circuiting, is functionally equivalent to lazyness in this respect. If you tried to automatically parallelize C by speculatively evaluating both sides you would have exactly the same problem. Lazy languages may make this kind of code easier to write, but the problem is actually that of non-deterministic calculations, and would be a problem anywhere.