| Book review - Purely Functional Data Structures (1998) | |||||||||||||||
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| e. So Chris Okasaki's book really deals with persistent data structures, which should make it worthwhile for a wider audience including imperative programmers. The book is divided into three parts. The first part serves as an introduction, the second explores the relationship between lazy evaluation and amortization, and the third is concerned with general design techniques. Part I. Chapter 1 sets the stage by delineating the difference between functional and imperative data structures and between eager and lazy evaluation. Chapter 2 explains how functional languages achieve persistence through path copying. Actually the chapter serves a double purpose since it also illustrates the use of signatures, structures and functors for implementing abstract data types. This mingling is a bit unfortunate as it possibly distracts from the main thread. Chapter 3 covers three data structures which are easily implemented in a functional setting: leftist heaps, binomial queues, and | |||||||||||||||
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