Some Familiar Data Structures in a Functional Setting

TL;DRAbstract

Although many imperative data structures are difficult or impossible to adapt to a functional setting, some can be adapted quite easily. In this chapter, we review three data structures that are commonly taught in an imperative setting. The first, leftist heaps, is quite simple in either setting, but the other two, binomial queues and red-black trees, have a reputation for being rather complicated because imperative implementations of these data structures often degenerate into nightmares of pointer manipulations. In contrast, functional implementations of these data structures abstract away from troublesome pointer manipulations and directly reflect the high-level ideas. A bonus of implementing these data structures functionally is that we get persistence for free.

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