At 9:30 AM -0600 12/7/01, Bryan Hayes (Hayes Technologies) wrote: > I am totally new to Haskell, so maybe this is a stupid question. > Various languages have pointers (or references), for good reason. > Haskell can at least partly do without them (they are only existing > internally somehow). > My question is: Does Haskell principally not need pointers (i.e. in case > of 2 data structures needing to reference an other very > large data structure) or is this a design flaw or have a overlooked >something?
In Haskell, you can arrange for a large data structure to be shared by giving it a name, and then using the name wherever you'd use a pointer in some other language. For example, in > t = [0..] -- could be quite large > b = 3 : t > c = 5 : t the lists b and c share list t. Of course, these lists' implementations are full of pointers, but there's never a need for them to appear explicitly in Haskell programs. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Hamilton Richards, PhD Department of Computer Sciences Senior Lecturer Mail Code C0500 512-471-9525 The University of Texas at Austin Taylor Hall 5.138 Austin, Texas 78712-1188 [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
