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(From Oleg)
Henry Baker once remarked that pure functional objects are
cycle-free. It seems then it's impossible to process cyclic graphs in a pure-functional language. Well, Henry Baker's assertion is true only for strict languages. A non-strict language can easily create and traverse cyclic graphs.
Oleg has more to say about cyclic graphs and the Credit Card Transform.
Just the other day a student of mine told me he spent some time trying to prove that pure languages can't create cycles. Since he was talking about Haskell I was only too glad to tell him that things are a bit more complicated than that.
Posted to functional by Ehud Lamm on 9/18/02; 9:26:17 AM
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Building cyclic data structures in pure languages
