Organizing functional code for parallel execution or, foldl and foldr considered slightly harmful

Abstract

Alan Perlis, inverting OscarWilde's famous quip about cynics, once suggested, decades ago, that a Lisp programmer is one who knows the value of everything and the cost of nothing. Now that the conference on Lisp and Functional Programming has become ICFP, some may think that OCaml and Haskell programmers have inherited this (now undeserved) epigram.