Functional Pearl Trouble Shared is Trouble Halved

A nexus is a tree that contains shared nodes, nodes that have more than one incoming arc. Shared nodes are created in almost every functional program - for instance, when updating a purely functional data structure - though programmers are seldom aware of this. In fact, there are only a few algorith...

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Hlavní autoři: Bird, R, Hinze, R
Médium: Journal article
Jazyk:English
Vydáno: 2003
Popis
Shrnutí:A nexus is a tree that contains shared nodes, nodes that have more than one incoming arc. Shared nodes are created in almost every functional program - for instance, when updating a purely functional data structure - though programmers are seldom aware of this. In fact, there are only a few algorithms that exploit sharing of nodes consciously. One example is constructing a tree in sublinear time. In this pearl we discuss an intriguing application of nexuses; we show that they serve admirably as memo structures featuring constant time access to memoized function calls. Along the way we encounter Boolean lattices and binomial trees.