Tuple-like constructors

[Malcolm Wallace]

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak at knm.org.pl> writes:

> In my language Kogut there are only pairs, and larger tuples are
> expressed by nested pairs (biased in the same direction as lists,
> without an end marker of course).
> 
> I wonder whether the performance difference is really that
> significant. Short tuples seem to be much more common. Anyone could
> gather statistics about runtime usage of tuples of varying sizes?

I agree that most uses of tuples are small, and for these, a nested
representation will not be so bad.  But Robert was proposing a
nested representation precisely for the case where the tuples are
large (possibly machine generated), and it is in those cases that
performance might start to matter.

Regards,
    Malcolm