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Re: New Cat Release and Documentation
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Posted: Jun 21, 2006 8:53 AM
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> > Because everything is purely functional in Cat this
> means
> > that any list or data structure in Cat has to maintain
I have a few observations:
> - In a case like the one you proposed, no part of the
> program ever uses the unreduced list. A smart compiler
> could destroty the original list without changing the
> program semantics
OK, how about this ;-)
[bigprogram] dup ! => [bigprogram] [bigprogram] => [bigprogram] bigprogram
Surely the quoted [bigprogram] should not be destroyed by the reduced program.
> - Copying semantics aren't so bad as all that. e.g. C++
> programs often run fine
What about the efficient concatenation of big lists A and B (or programs)?Surely you this operation to be fast to, say O(log(size(A) + size(B)) and not O(size(A + B)).
> - A sequence of consecutive numbers would be better
> represented using:
>
> def myseq = 1 1000000 init;
>
> which can be easily stored as a generator function
> internally.
Yes, it would be a lazy list ;-)
>
> As an interesting node: I have a list class in C# under
> development which switches between different internal
> representations based on usage. For example, in some
> circumstances it uses an array representation, in others a
> linked list, and in others still it uses a generator
> function.
Cool.
>
> Finally, I should ask, are there better alternatives I am
> not aware of? I am definitely open to suggestions.
May be you should look at Chris Okasaki's work on purely functional datastructures. The most recent development is: Finger Trees by Ralf Hinze. I also use Treaps sometimes for fast list implementations.
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