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How important are circular lists/recursive objects?
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Date: | 2007-04-04 (05:33) |
From: | skaller <skaller@u...> |
Subject: | Re: [Caml-list] Re: How important are circular lists/recursive objects? |
On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 23:52 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote: > > The question is: if this behavior was completely outlawed, and either you > > couldn't build up circular lists/recursive data structures of this type at > > all, or had to call special functions (List.circularize, say), to create > > them, would this be a signifigant problem? Does anyone actually use this > > construct, and if so, for what? > > This is the case in SML: you need to go through a `ref' cell in order to > create a cycle. This has very rarely been presented as > a serious limitation. OCaml's trick is occasionally useful, but I don't > think anybody would lose her sleep over it. You can also create cycles using functional abstraction (otherwise a pure FPL wouldn't need a garbage collector, ref counting would suffice). -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net> Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net