Fast Mutable arrays and a general question about IO

[Jon Cast]

Ron de Bruijn <rondebruijn@yahoo.com> wrote:

> > Why?  It's not always necessary to go for maximum speed; do you have
> > a reason for needing it in this case?
> 
> Almost any operation in my program works on array's and before the
> program terminates, there have been an awful lot of operations on
> it. If there is an other kind of array that mutates and doesn't create
> a copy of it when changing a value and isn't more than 1,5 times as
> slow as an array in C++ then that should also be ok. The program would
> run in a scale of hours or days. And if it's twice as fast, than I
> could calculate two times as much.

Alright.

<snip>

> > I think you mean `above'.  In any case, could you show us some code
> > you have that's not working?  That'll make it much easier for us to
> > answer your questions.
> > 
> 
> Well I don't have really code, because I want to begin programming it.
> 
> I will restate my goal: I want to be able to read, update and create
> arrays in Haskell of type myDataType (suppose my constructor function
> is Con Int String Int)

Alright.  You seem to have the concepts down here, so I would recommend
you try to start on your own, and mail us back when you have a problem.

> on a way that's fast, preferabily the fastest method.

I don't know what the fastest method is, although I doubt you'll get
anything (natively) faster than IOArray, or IOUArray if you only need
arrays of primitive types.

<snip>

> > > So to put it more concrete: In any Haskell program that does IO
> > > there is always some function that has this form:
> > > 
> > > do x<-someSource
> > >    putBoundVariableToSomeOtherFunctionThatDoesMonadicOperations
> > >      (restOfPureFunctionalProgramForExample x)
> > 
> > No.
> 
> Why not? 

Sorry; I put that reply in the wrong place; I meant it to refer to the
item below it (meaning it's not possible to do IO within a value of type
Int).  You are correct that there must be a function in any program with
/at least/ that form (i.e., there could be more statements, but if you
want to do processing within pure Haskell, you need to wrap that
processing ultimately roughly as shown above).

Jon Cast