Forwarded on behalf of Matthias: From: Matthias Radestock <matthias@xxxxxxxxxx> Organization: LShift Ltd To: srfi-44@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: why are there no mutable collections? The SRFI document refers to mutability in several places, yet the only mutating operations defined are linear updates. Linear update, as it is currently defined is "optional", ie. linear update operations are free to return fresh data structures. Thus linear update is little more than an optimization technique based on hints from the user, and the SRFI does not cater for mutable collections. Many Schemes have mutable collections (e.g. hash tables are usually defined as mutable collections) and there is a substantial code base that relies on this mutability. Such code could not be easily modified to take advantage of this SRFI, which seems unfortunate. Mutation is evil in most cases, but it can be useful. That's why Scheme has set!, set-car! and set-cdr!. So can we please have mutable collections. Matthias. ----- End forwarded message ----- --
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