Mutation

[Pierpaolo Bernardi]

> consider the following situation :
> 
> i'm reading text into a buffer.  i'm going to want to compute based on the
> text, but i don't want to keep it.  thus, when processing a lot of files i 
> use a single buffer and write over it repeatedly to cut down on gratuitous
> consing.  
> 
> how would this be resolved in a functional object framework?

(I haven't yet read all the mail in this thread, sorry if this is
has already been proposed)

I have a little implementation of functional arrays in common lisp,
based on the one presented by Larry Paulson in 'ML for the Working
Programmer', I may post this implementation on this list tomorrow
(it's about a page of code), so people may experiment and decide for
themselves if they are useful.

This implementation is based on a mutable vector and version trees.
More details tomorrow (If I'm not stopped before 8-)


Pierpaolo Bernardi.