AW: [Caml-list] OCaml troll on Slashdot

AW: [Caml-list] OCaml troll on Slashdot

[Bauer, Christoph]

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Hi, 

> I realize that this problem can be coded around, sometimes 
> with better data
> structures, or by the double reversing approach (which is 
> what I used to use)
> but my own sense of programming language aesthetics is that 
> this is a flaw, or
> at least a hole in the language that should be filled one day.

There is an implementation of VLists for OCaml. VLists are - like 
single linked lists - persistent, but have better performance,
require less memory and are GC friendlier. Here is
the announcement and a link to the paper:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=6740097&forum_id=2988
0

Stack overflow problems should be solved. Unfortunatly you loose 
the ability of pattern matching and  List contruction with the
bracket notation.

The paper is quite nice.

Christoph Bauer



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Re: AW: [Caml-list] OCaml troll on Slashdot

[Alain Frisch]

Bauer, Christoph wrote:
> There is an implementation of VLists for OCaml. VLists are - like
> single linked lists - persistent, but have better performance,
> require less memory and are GC friendlier.

This depends on the kind of operation you need: the VList.tl operation 
is more complex and always incurs memory allocation (this can be avoided 
  in theory, but it seem difficult to do it in OCaml). In particular, if 
you implement the map function using only VList.tl and VList.hd, the 
result will probably be much slower than with lists (of course, there is 
a more efficient VList.map, but it cannot be written using only the 
VList API).

-- Alain