Hi all !
As I am sure most people here know, functional programmers prefer to use
non-mutable data, very often lists. There are also non-mutable arrays.
Now, in J development, we talk about operations in place, which seems to
go in opposite direction, from the mainly non-mutable arrays we have to
mutable arrays. Is there an analysis which shows that this is the right
way to go?
Another option would be to use non-mutable arrays, specifically array
classes structured in such a way that you can create a copy which reuses
the old unchanged content and then change the contents of this copy.
Usually you can create a mutable array and define its content, then make
it non-mutable before you return it.
I tried non-mutable array in F#, and they seem slow compared to ordinary
arrays, but on some of them a copy operation was very fast. I am not
sure of how using such arrays would affect the performance of our systems.
Cheers,
Erling Hellenäs
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