Functional data structures as updatable objects

The threat of continuous data copying is one of the key problems in applicative programming. The opportunities to implement functional data structures as updatable objects, thus avoiding any form of copying, are discussed. The notion of incremental structures and associated storage is used. Its specification is modified so as to handle sequential and shared structures. The former can be used in the case when only data dependencies and not data values are considered in source program analysis. The latter can be used for nondeterministic applications such as system programming.<
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