Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: k-minima in Haskell

Dan Weston writes:

Ah, but which k elements? You won't know until you've drained your entire stream!

True, but you still don't need to keep the whole stream in memory at once, just the k-least-so-far as you work your way through the stream - once you've read a part of the stream you can mostly forget it again. The question as I understood it was one of if even in Haskell there's a better way than sorting that means you need only have a fragment of the stream in memory at once. -- Mark