Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> [I particularly like that way that if I make an array of 4 million 
> Boolean values, each one takes up exactly 1 *bit* of RAM. And yet, the 
> interface is identical to any other kind of array...]

  But my point was not really that. In Java you can, for example, create
an array if 32-bit integers, and each integer will take only 32 bits of
memory. That's not the problem.

  The problem in Java is that if you are making an array of *objects*,
each object having only one 32-bit integer as a member variable, there's
just no way of making each object take only 32 bits of memory.

  So you have only two options: Create a "low-level" array of integers,
which is extremely rigid and very hard to maintain (as it basically is
an array of "exposed objects"), or you create an array of abstract objects
at the cost of the memory consumption increasing by a considerable factor.

  I understand that you can create an "array of integers" or "array of
booleans" in Haskell, but that's not really what I was asking.

> Haskell has "modules". The module is the unit of abstraction in Haskell. 
> When you write a module, you can define precisely what parts of it are 
> visible from the outside, and which parts aren't.

  So Haskell is really a two-paradigm language: Functional and modular?

  (To understand what the "modular programming paradigm" means, it's
basically the same thing as the "object-oriented programming paradigm"
minus inheritance and dynamic binding.)

  Anyways, my real question was: Given such a module (eg. "a pixel"),
can you, for example, create an array of them so that each one takes
only as much memory as the sum of the sizes of its member variables?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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