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Functional Pe(a)rls: Huey's Zipper

By osfameron from Italia.pm,London.pm,NorthWestEngland.pm,Edinburgh.pm
Date: Saturday, 23 August 2014 14:50
Duration: 50 minutes
Target audience: Any
Language: English
Tags: ducks fp haskell immutable moo perl pure trees zipper

You can find more information on the speaker's site:

• Talk: http://www.slideshare.net/osfameron/functional-pearls-hueys-zipper

"Associative arrays" are a powerful and flexible data-structure for mapping keys to values. In Perl, we usually call them "hashes", but in fact a hash table is only one concrete implementation of the concept.

In the world of Functional Programming, using hash tables to implement associative arrays turns out to have some fairly serious issues. Most implementations use binary trees instead. We'll look at why that is, and some of the benefits and trade-offs of each approach.

We'll also look at a new implementation of AA Red-Black trees in Perl and Moo. We'll see some of the challenges of writing immutable code in Perl, and also learn about ducks, and the awesome power of Huey's Zipper (sic).