< programming > An evaluation strategy under which an expression is evaluated by repeatedly evaluating its leftmost innermost redex . This means that a function's arguments are evaluated before the function is applied. This method will not terminate if a function is given a non-terminating expression as an argument even if the function is not strict in that argument. Also known as call-by-value since the values of arguments are passed rather than their names. This is the evaluation strategy used by ML , Scheme , Hope and most procedural languages such as C and Pascal .
See also normal order reduction , parallel reduction .
(1995-01-25)