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

[Robert Dockins]

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?

Robert

Simon Marlow wrote:

> On 07 October 2004 18:23, Ketil Malde wrote:
> 
> 
>>Couldn't readFile et al. provide the standard interface, but use
>>hGetBuf tricks (e.g. from your 'wc' entry) behind the curtains?
> 
> 
> readFile does do buffering behind the scenes, that's not the problem.
> The problem is doing the computation on a [Char] instead of a raw buffer
> of bytes.
> 
> There are various known techniques that could be used to speed up GHC's
> implementation of lists, none of which we've ever tried.  This might be
> a good area for experimentation, if anyone's looking for something to do
> in GHC.
> 
> Cheers,
> 	Simon
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