On Monday 11 February 2002 02:10, Hal Daume III wrote:

So instaed of storing 1 and 2 in the list, it stores pointers to them. The reason it does this is so that it makes it easy to generate code for polymorhpic functions. (,) being boxed means that instead of storing a pair of element, you're storing a pair of pointers. That means you get worse performance because you have to chase more pointers.

(at least that's my impression) Thanks, I knew the concept but not the name.

On Sunday 10 February 2002 18:48, Kirsten Chevalier wrote:

I'd guess that it's not just that you have to apply the (,) constructor -- it also has to do with the fact that the tuples it's constructing here are boxed. This brings another question to my mind, isn't it toupling a standard technique used in functional programming? I'm pretty sure I've seen it focused in some papers/text books. I for one would not expect that folding the list twice would be more efficient...

J.A.