Persistent list
A persistent list is an immutable ordered list whose updates produce new versions while preserving earlier versions, typically through structural sharing.
Data-Oriented Programming: Reduce software complexity
A persistent list is an immutable list whose earlier versions remain available after elements are added or updated.
- How it is used
- Uses immutable versions and structural sharing to create and manipulate large collections without copying all their elements.
- How deep it goes
- Explains tree depth, branching factor, operation counts, and practical performance, then stops short of implementation code.
- Examples
- Uses 25,000-element copying, 100,000-element lists, repeated splitting, and branching factors of 2 and 32.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate persistent-list performance by relating access and update costs to tree depth and branching factor.
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Clojure: The Essential Reference
clojure.lang.PersistentList is Clojure's immutable persistent singly linked-list implementation.
- How it is used
- Uses linked head insertion for language forms, stacks, reversal, and selected sequence-processing algorithms.
- How deep it goes
- Explains construction, head insertion, stack operations, reversal, exceptions, and linked-list representation, with performance details deferred for reverse.
- Examples
- Demonstrates head insertion, collection reversal, nearest-smaller search, DNA reverse-complement processing, and delimiter checking.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch with list, conj, into, peek, and pop to implement reversal and last-in-first-out processing.
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Related concepts
- reversingproduced by · Reversing is an operation that produces a sequence's elements in the opposite order, either by modifying the source or returning a reversed sequence.
- listproduced by · A list is an ordered collection of elements arranged in a sequence.
- persistent data structurekind of · A persistent data structure preserves access to previous versions because updates create new versions without modifying existing ones.
- linked listkind of · An ordered sequence of elements stored in separate nodes connected by links or references rather than in one contiguous storage region.
- branching factorconfigures · A branching factor is the number of successor nodes or choices available from a node, commonly represented by a maximum or average value.
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