EXPERIMENTS WITH DESTRUCTIVE UPDATES IN A LAZY FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE

The aggregate update problem has received considerable attention since pure functional programming languages were recognised as an interesti ng research topic. There is extensive literature in this area, which p roposes a wide variety of solutions. We have tried to apply some of th e proposed solutions to our own applications to see how these solution s work in practice. We have been able to use destructive updates but a re not convinced that this could have been achieved without applicatio n specific knowledge. In particular, no form of update analysis has be en reported that is applicable to non-flat domains in polymorphic lang uages with higher order functions. It is our belief that a refinement of the monolithic approach towards constructing arrays may be a good a lternative to using the incremental approach with destructive updates.