RFC: general sequences

[Ross Paterson]

On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 03:01:46PM +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> On Tue, 24 May 2005, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> >There is also the argument that an Int is always big enough to be used
> >as an index into a data structure that can fit in memory. This also
> >applies to 64 bit machines because the Int just gets bigger. And so the
> >argument goes, if Int is sufficient then there is the performance
> >advantage of simple machine integers.
> 
> A list can be infinite, the garbage collector can throw away nodes with 
> small indices. So it is possible to access nodes above INT_MAX. E.g. 
> x!!(1e10) will generate 1e10 nodes but not all of them are hold in 
> memory.

Lists can be infinite, but not sequences, as the operations are strict.