In the second case, if your numerical data is just a big array, why not just mmap it? Unless you're running on a 32 bit machine, or have a *seriously* large amount of data, that seems like the easiest option. Although if you're talking about mutable data, that's a whole 'nother can of worms... but that's true even if your data fits into memory.
You could look at Data.ByteString to get some idea as to how to wrap a pure interface around a disk-backed chunk of read-only memory. Or just read about the ffi, it's not too hard to figure out. David On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 01:27:03PM -0700, Carter T Schonwald wrote: > The main two use cases I have in mind are > 1) really really really big abstract syntax trees or proof trees (a la > compilers or theorem provers) > 2) random access to numerical data > > does that help clarify what i'm asking about? In each case, is there a > standard way of dealing with this? > in the case of (1) the sensible way seems to me to do some sort of zipper > representation which loads adjacent nodes to some depth surrounding your > current location in the tree, and in the case of (2) it seems like the > sensible way would be load subsequences of the data into memory. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
