[Haskell-cafe] Re: OCaml list sees abysmal Language Shootoutresults

[William Lee Irwin III]

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 08:35:40AM -0400, Robert Dockins wrote:
> Actually, I've been wondering about this.  If my understanding is 
> correct, Haskell lists are basicly singly-linked lists of cons cells (is 
> that correct?)  A simple (I think) thing to do would be to make the 
> lists doubly-linked and circular.  That would let us do nice things like 
> have O(1) primops for reverse, tail, (++) and other things that access 
> lists at the end.  However, I'm still pretty new to FP in general, so I 
> don't know if there are any theoretical reasons why something like this 
> couldn't work.  Obviously lazy and infinite lists add some wrinkles, but 
> I think it could be worked through.
> BTW can you give some references to these known techniques?

Ugh, lousy cache properties... try rank-ordered B+ trees. There are
probably better choices than that even. It's probably best Simon point
us to references to what's actually useful here.


-- wli