William Lee Irwin III
Actually, I've been wondering about this. If my understanding is correct, Haskell lists are basicly singly-linked lists of cons cells (is that correct?) A simple (I think) thing to do would be to make the lists doubly-linked and circular.
Uh, I think one of the main problems with the usual IO functions is that it adds the overhead of cons cells and optionally 32bit chars (although I think GHC packs them for char values <256) - when you really want an (unboxed) array of Word8.
BTW can you give some references to these known techniques?
Ugh, lousy cache properties... try rank-ordered B+ trees. There are probably better choices than that even. It's probably best Simon point us to references to what's actually useful here.
I'm as dumb as anybody, but it seems to me that one could read a lazy chain (list) of buffers as UArray Int Word8, and tack a list-type interface (head, tail, cons...) interface on top. -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants