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Why Lists?I just want to ask the rather naive question: Why are lists the most popular builtin aggregate data structure in FP langs? I understand the historical precedent for lists, and I understand that lists are very well understood. But really, there is nothing magical about lists, and computationally, they aren't particularly cheap. It seems to me that the basic interface lists provide that FP consumes is head(), rest(), append(), and splice(). There may be a few others, but my point is that there are lots of data structures that can support this interface. So why not make the interface intrinsic, rather than the data structure, and support lots of different structures intrisically (arrays and trees come to mind)? By David B. Held at 2005-10-24 14:49 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 14570 reads
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