Algorithmic lists

[Ulf Wiger]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Richard Carlsson wrote:

>
>On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Ulf Wiger wrote:
>
>> OK, since noone complained too much, here's a hack of lists.erl,
>> where most functions have been enhanced to operate on both eager
>> and lazy lists.
>
>Well, your hacked functions give correct output, but do they behave
>as you intented? They are all eager, in that if you apply your new
>`map' on a lazy list, it forces evaluation of the whole list.

Yes, this is exactly was was intended for the lists.erl module, since
it has to be backwards compatible.

Functions that generate lazy lists would have to go into your
lazy_lists module (is it finished yet).  ;)


/Uffe

>A more generally useful implementation would return a new lazy list,
>where the `map' operation is not performed on any element until that
>element is requested. Then you can create a list like the following:
>
>		lazy_lists:map(fun (X) -> X * 2 end,
>		               lazy_lists:natural_numbers())
>
>(the list of all even nonnegative numbers) and then pass the result
>to another function, which can pick as many elements from the list
>as it wants, or none at all.
>
>	/Richard Carlsson

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