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20:39:48
kiki_lamb
So, someone I'm talking to is making themselves a toy Lisp, and they seem like they're entertaining the idea of having many/most of the 'lists' actually being implemented as some kind of vector/array under the hood. How bad of an idea is this? Are there examples of this being done? It seems like it's going to be at least a bit awkward, with special cases needed for handling shared tails and circular
20:45:10
pjb
kiki_lamb: implementation details don't matter. They just may have an impact on performance or implementation complexity.
20:46:56
kiki_lamb
sure... this language is just a toy, they're basically a student, so I'm trying to offer advice that keeps the implementation simple, it's the first time they've implemented any parser or language.
20:48:14
kiki_lamb
Apparently the language they're implementing in makes true linked lists a bit awkwards, which seems like a shame... actually using linked lists in the implementation seems like it would be a simpler implementation, to me.
20:55:28
jcowan
kiki_lamb: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/lisp-faq/part2/section-9.html describes cdr-coding