Chris Hecker wrote:

> I'm open minded, so I'm genuinely interested to know if the work of 
> making something like a simple datastructure purely functional is more 
> than an academic exercise, or if it pays back in real-sized production software.

Depends on the application. Consider for example a browser in which
when you hit the 'back' button, you want to go back to the same
state as previously: with purely functional data structures attached
to a state object, going back is a simple matter of popping the state
object from a stack (and re-rendering :-)

This is not so easy to do with a more extensively mutable state object.

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John (Max) Skaller, mailto:skaller@maxtal.com.au
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