Re: [Caml-list] Strings as arrays or lists...

[Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons <Diego-Olivier.FERNANDEZ-PONS@cicrp.jussieu.fr>]

    Bonjour,

Brian Rogoff wrote :

> As far as char lists being somewhat advantageous in a lazy language,
> well, I won't start a flamewar as to whether laziness as the default
> is a good design decision (oh hell, I'll admit, I think it isn't)
> but I'll repeat my observation that in the Clean language, also lazy
> by default like Haskell, strings are unboxed character arrays.

Caml is a 'most of the time strict but lazy when you need' language
whereas Haskell is a 'most of the time lazy but strict when you need'
one.

And Caml already provides support for lazy lists by means of the
Stream module, which is pretty good and convenient.

> I'm sure there are numerous ideas just for string libraries, and
> that we could fill an entire mailing list just with those. Ropes (a
> binary tree representation for applicative "big strings") and
> extended character sets (I guess Camomile is doing that now?) are my
> favorites.

Hum... Fast catenable arrays are the subject of Ralf Hinze last paper
'bootstrapping one-side flexible arrays'. He uses weight balanced
trees of imperative arrays.

It also makes a good representation for (precomputed) streams.


        Diego Olivier

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