2008/6/25 Conal Elliott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I have a foggy memory that early ML had only binary pairing, nesting for > n-tuples. Can anyone confirm this memory. If so, does anyone remember the > rationale for going to n-tuples? Performance, perhaps? > > Similarly, did the Haskell designers consider pairs as an alternative to > n-ary tuples?
I think performance was part of it: accessing the nth element of a tuple is O(1), but the nth element of a nested pair is O(n). On the other hand, you can't internally represent nested pairs as n-tuples because of laziness. (a,(b,c)) has elements of the form (x,_|_) that don't correspond to any triple. -- Dave Menendez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/> _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
