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Re: functional languages ill-suited for large programs?



vkarvone@mappi.helsinki.fi wrote in article <1067637367.3fa2da77da4ea@www3.helsinki.fi> in gmane.comp.lang.lightweight:
> Note that trivial delaying of computation, like is done implicitly by lazy
> languages, has basically almost nothing to do with the kind of "caching
> optimizations", or the algorithm design technique known as Dynamic
> Programming, that I believe we have been discussing here.

I'm not so sure.  Memoization ("caching optimizations") and dynamic
programming can be simulated using a lazily evaluated table of results.
For instance, we can memoize the factorial function by making an
infinite factorial table (either a list or an array), lazily evaluated.
We can also memoize a string parsing function by making a pyramid-shaped
table of which substrings parse as which nonterminals, lazily evaluated.

	Ken

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