I fully realize that this is probably not the smartest question. Seemed a bit advanced for the beginners list though.

I've been studying procedural/fractal terrain. It would seem that much of it hinges on "lazy evaluation," which is a term some Haskell hackers I knew threw around. The gist I got was that lazy evaluation involved two things, referential transparency and evaluation avoidance.

Since Smalltalk is late bound, I think I can avoid evaluating expressions as long as I like with closures... but since it's mutable state all the way down, I wonder about the referential transparency part. I mean, Turing completeness suggests that it's doable, I'm just wondering how painful it would be.

Guessing someone here will have a better understanding of the whole lazy eval business, and I'm particularly interested in seeing implementations that use it.