Linearity and Laziness

A criticism often levelled at functional languages is that they do not cope elegantly or efficiently with problems involving changes of state. In a recent paper [26], Wadler has proposed a new approach to these problems. His proposal involves the use of a type system based on the linear logic of Girard [7]. This allows the programmer to specify the "natural" imperative operations without at the same time sacrificing the crucial property of referential transparency. In this paper we investigate the practicality of Wadler's approach, describing the design and implementation of a variant of Lazy ML [2]. A small example program shows how imperative operations can be used in a referentially transparent way, and at the same time it highlights some of the problems with the approach. Our implementation is based on a variant of the G-machine [15, 1]. We give some benchmark figures to compare the performance of our machine with the original one. The results are disappointing: the cost of maintai..