Land of Lisp

Chapter 18. Lazy Programming

In Chapter 14, you learned that your programs can be simpler and cleaner when built with clean, math-like functions. These functions always return the same result, which depends solely on the arguments passed into them. When you rely only on these types of functions, you are using the functional programming style.

However, when we used the functional programming style to create the Dice of Doom game in Chapter 15, a problem became evident: If your functions rely entirely on the arguments passed into them, the stuff that you need to pass into them often becomes huge.

In the Dice of Doom game, we pass around the game-tree variable, which holds all the possible future states of the game board. This is a truly massive structure, ...