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By default, collection classes such as List and Map are immutable, so update-methods return a new instance rather than mutating an existing one. While this may sound inefficient, the implementation of these classes and their guarantees of immutability mean that the new instance can re-use existing nodes, which, especially in the case of ...
Arrays, unlike the basic Object type, are prototyped with methods and properties to aid the programmer in routine tasks (for example, join, slice, and push). As in the C family , arrays use a zero-based indexing scheme: A value that is inserted into an empty array by means of the push method occupies the 0th index of the array.
Concrete classes have to explicitly declare they implement the immutable interface. This may not be possible if the concrete class "belongs to" third-party code, for instance, if it is contained within a library. The object is not really immutable and hence not suitable for use in data structures relying on immutability like hash maps.
Regarding efficiency, declaring classes simplifies many compiler optimizations that allow developing efficient method and instance-variable lookup. For the Self language, much development time was spent on developing, compiling, and interpreting techniques to improve the performance of prototype-based systems versus class-based systems.
Perhaps the simplest persistent data structure is the singly linked list or cons-based list, a simple list of objects formed by each carrying a reference to the next in the list. This is persistent because the tail of the list can be taken, meaning the last k items for some k, and new nodes can be added in front of it. The tail will not be ...
For example, the decorator pattern (as mentioned above) has been proposed to overcome the static nature of inheritance between classes. As a more fundamental solution to the same problem, role-oriented programming introduces a distinct relationship, played-by , combining properties of inheritance and composition into a new concept.
For example, array with constant-time access and update is a basic component of most imperative languages and many imperative data-structures, such as hash table and binary heap, are based on arrays. Arrays can be replaced by map or random access list, which admits purely functional implementation, but the access and update time is logarithmic ...
While existing monads may be easy to apply in a program, given appropriate templates and examples, many students find them difficult to understand conceptually, e.g., when asked to define new monads (which is sometimes needed for certain types of libraries). [81] Functional languages also simulate states by passing around immutable states.