Immutable arrays (modest Feature request)

From: Thorsten Ohl (ohl@hep.tu-darmstadt.de)
Date: Wed Jan 12 2000 - 16:45:42 MET

  • Next message: Pierre Weis: "Re: Immutable arrays (modest Feature request)"

    I've always wondered why O'Caml has no notion of immutable arrays or
    vectors. (Mutable) Arrays are often inconvenient because callers and
    callees must negotiate who is doing the copying. A conservative
    approach will do too many copies.

    Semantically, a vector of size n would be a record with
    labels 0,...,n-1 and with O(1) access. One would initialize them from
    a constant (e.g. let v = [{ 42; 137; 1789 }]), a list, an array, or a
    function. Updates would be requested by [{ v with 2 = 2000 }] and most
    of the Array and List library is useful for vectors.

    I admit that this is theoretically not very exciting (except for the
    question when the `with' must copy and when not), but rather useful.

    Cheers,
    -Thorsten 

    -- 
Thorsten Ohl, Physics Department, TU Darmstadt -- ohl@hep.tu-darmstadt.de
http://heplix.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de/~ohl/ [<=== PGP public key here]

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