[racket] Y combinator

Thank-you all for your help with my Y-combinator question.

I've now got myself a copy of *The Little Schemer*, and think that i'm
getting there.

Some googling on the lambda calculus and fixed point combinators introduced
me the formalism:

((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))

The general setting helped me see what was going on with (make-list
make-list) etc ... in an abstract sense (i've never studied CS) however i
do remain a little puzzled by Matthias' second hint:

"when you have an expression e and you know it will evaluate to a function
if the evaluation terminates but it may not terminate, you can write
(lambda (x) (e x)) to make sure that it is a function NOW. That way you can
pass this quasi-e to another function and it can make the decision to
evaluate it or not.  If you had written the derivation in #lang lazy as
opposed to #lang racket, you would not need this trick. In a lazy language
e is passed as an argument without being evaluated to start with."

Why does (lambda (x) (e x)) make it evaluate once and stop? I mean how come
when the evaluator gets to the call it doesn't get stuck in a loop?

Additionally, chapter 8 is very interesting.  I see that i can translate a
simple recursive function the following way

(define (sum n)
  (if (zero? n)
   0
   (+ n (sum (sub1 n)))))
(sum 10)

to

(define (sum&co n k)
  (if zero? n)
   (k 0)
   (sum&co (sub1 n) (lambda (r) (k (+ n r))))))
(sum 10 (lambda (r) r))

but i really don't see why one would ever bother to do so.  What are the
benefits? the cost (hard to read / write / understand) seems high.

thanks for your help (& further references appreciated).

best regards

mj
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