Experiments with destructive updates in a lazy functional language

Abstract

The aggregate update problem has received considerable attention since pure functional programming languages were recognised as an interesting research topic. There is extensive literature in this area, which proposes a wide variety of solutions. We have tried to apply some of the proposed solutions to our own applications to see how these solutions work in practice. We have been able to use destructive updates but are not convinced that this could have been achieved without application specific knowledge. In particular, no form of update analysis has been reported that is applicable to non-flat domains in polymorphic languages with higher order functions.

It is our belief that a refinement of the monolithic approach towards constructing arrays may be a good alternative to using the incremental approach with destructive updates.