Re: [Haskell-cafe] [newbie question] Memoization automatic in Haskell?

On Jan 12, 2008, at 18:16 , Hugh Perkins wrote:

On Jan 12, 2008 10:54 PM, Henning Thielemann wrote:

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On Sat, 12 Jan 2008, Hugh Perkins wrote:

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I guess that Haskell's referential transparence means the answers to the isPerfectSquare will be cached, ie automatically memoized? (not sure if is correct term?)

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Memoization

Interesting... but I dont understand... I thought that referential transparence meant that once the answer to a function has been calculated once, it will always be the same, and that the interpreter can, and will, cache this answer?

It *can* cache the answer, if it so chooses... but that often turns out to be a pessimization, as it caches values that are only used once or twice. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH