[pherq]

The code example you give isn't an example of evaluation order, it's an example of different expressions not giving the same result.

Order of evaluation being irrelevant means that when evaluating

    (cons 'a (cons 'b nil))

it doesn't matter whether you first create the outer or inner cons cell. Or, for that matter, whether you do anything at all at this point (you could for instance just suspend the entire expression as a thunk and only evaluate them when you try and access values within the list -- i.e. lazy evaluation).

[kaoD]

It's not an example of evaluation order because we weren't discussing evaluation order. GP said:

> If objects are mutable then the order of execution matters, and you have to trust the programmer to get the data flow and control flow to agree

Which is true both for OOP and FP, unless I misunderstood what GP meant with data and control flow.