Re: [Scheme-reports] Proposed new SRFI for immutable lists

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@x>]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 1:14 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli@x> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 9:42 AM, Alex Shinn <alexshinn@x> wrote:
>
> The original question was whether cycles were possible in "strict
> immutable structures."  I would allow promises as part of that
> structure, and consider them immutable so long as they aren't using
> mutable variables or data structures.

OK, so IOW nothing new.

Indeed, the trick is quite old.

> There's no reason immutable pairs couldn't be implemented in terms of
> promises, in which case the tying the knot trick could be used (under
> the hood) to provide utilities for generating cyclic immutable lists.

IME, it comes out like regular code -- not much different from Racket's
reader graphs which are used to implement cyclic cons structures.  (Only
that requires an explicit step that turns the "reader graph" into a
sexpr.)

Yes, but doesn't the conversion from graph to immutable

cons cells require Racket-specific extensions?

I believe for purposes of this SRFI, the question of adding

support for shared structure in ipairs should depend on

whether it can be done portably.

The naive approach would be to define ipairs with setters

and simply not export those setters to the user.  This runs

into problems with future extensions for record introspection.

However, using lazy evaluation one could have truly

immutable, portable records and still provide such

utilities as `circular-ilist' and the equivalent of Racket's

`shared'.

-- 

Alex

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