On Wed, 15 May 2002, Hal Daume III wrote:
I tend to agree. I keep meaning for experimental purposes to define a list type called AList or something which is syntactically identical to lists (i.e., you can use the familiar (:) and [] operators/sugar), but gets preprocessed out as actually being implemented with an array with a pointer to the "current" element. Especially if we use unboxed types for such a thing, I imagine that on many applications this would give a boost in performance.
As a pointer, I vagueley recall Phil Wadler's (his homepage currently seems to be http://www.research.avayalabs.com/user/wadler/), way back in something like 1984, was looking at something like this. The title was something like "Listlessness is better than laziness". I never actually read a copy, and don't know where you'd get one from, but if you are thinking about this sort of thing semi-seriously it sounds like somehting worth consulting. HTH ___cheers,_dave_________________________________________________________ www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/ | `It's no good going home to practise email:tweed@cs.bris.ac.uk | a Special Outdoor Song which Has To Be work tel:(0117) 954-5250 | Sung In The Snow' -- Winnie the Pooh