Embodiments of the present invention facilitate parallel distributed computing. During operation, embodiments of the present invention receive from a requesting node an operator o1 and unevaluated expressions representing arguments for that operator. Next, embodiments of the invention evaluate the arguments and then determine another unevaluated expression based on that operator and the evaluated arguments. Subsequently, embodiments of the invention send the another evaluated expression to other nodes for evaluation and receive the resulting evaluated expression, which is then returned to the requesting node.