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List: haskell-cafe
Subject: RE: [Haskell-cafe] Newbie question about automatic memoization
From: "peterv" <bf3 () telenet ! be>
Date: 2007-07-31 19:06:23
Message-ID: 003b01c7d3a5$e321dba0$a96592e0$ () be
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Thanks! Is this is also the case when using let and where, or is this just
syntactic sugar?
-----Original Message-----
From: Jules Bean [mailto:jules@jellybean.co.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 5:09 PM
To: Bryan Burgers
Cc: peterv; haskell-cafe@haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Newbie question about automatic memoization
Bryan Burgers wrote:
> On 7/30/07, peterv <bf3@telenet.be> wrote:
>> Does Haskell support any form of automatic memorization?
>>
>> For example, does the function
>>
>> iterate f x
>>
>> which expands to
>>
>> [x, f(x), f(f(x)), f(f(f(x))), .
>>
>> gets slower and slower each iteration, or can it take advantage of the
fact
>> that f is referentially transparent and hence can be "memoized / cached"?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Peter
>
> For 'iterate' the answer does not really need to be memoized.
Or, another way of phrasing that answer is 'yes'. The definition of
iteration does memoize - although normally one would say 'share' - the
intermediate results.
>
> I imagine the definition of 'iterate' looks something like this:
>
> iterate f x = x : iterate f (f x)
>
Haskell doesn't automatically memoize. But you are entitled to assume
that named values are 'shared' rather than calculated twice. For
example, in the above expression "x", being a named value, is shared
between (a) the head of the list and (b) the parameter of the function
"f" inside the recursive call to iterate.
Of course sharing "x" may not seem very interesting, on the outermost
call, but notice that on the next call the new "x" is the old "f x", and
on the call after that the new "x" is "f (f x)" w.r.t the original "x".
Jules
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