zlist - Lazily-realized lists for OCaml

This is version 0.4.0, which is released under the terms of the Apache-2.0 license.

zlist is copyright 2016 by Jesse Haber-Kucharsky.

Overview

A lazy list is like an OCaml list, except that next element is lazily computed. These lists behave like the List type in Haskell.

This structure allows allows arbitrary transformations to be executed without forcing each intermediate representation in memory.

Another interesting property of lazy lists is that infinite structures can be constructed without being evaluated.

For example, this is an infinite list of the value 0:

 let zeros = Zlist.continually 0 

A similar structure to a lazy list is the (now) standard Seq.t type, which differs from lazy lists in that it is defined via a function unit -> 'a (a "thunk") instead of as a lazy value.

For applications in which zlist would be useful, it's likely that Seq.t is a better option due to interoperability with the wider OCaml ecosystem. Thus, the value in this package is mostly educational.

Examples

Each of these examples assumes that

 open Zlist 

has been executed.

• Generate an infinite sequence of even numbers and sample some of them:

  let evens = enum_from 0 |> map (fun x -> 2 * x) in
  evens |> take 4 |> strict

 - : int list = [0; 2; 4; 6] 

• Compute an infinite list of Fibonacci numbers and sample 8 of them:

  let fibs = iterate (0, 1) (fun (a, b) -> (b, a + b)) |> map snd in
  fibs |> take 8 |> strict

 - : int list = [1; 1; 2; 3; 5; 8; 13; 21] 

• A Quicksort-like algorithm:

  let ( ++ ) = concat in
  
  let rec sort = function
    | lazy Nil -> lazy Nil
    | lazy (Cons (x, t)) ->
        let smaller = filter (fun y -> y < x) t in
        let greater = filter (fun y -> y >= x) t in
        sort smaller ++ unit x ++ sort greater
  in
  
  sort (items [10; 2; 8; 5; 1; 0; 20; 3]) |> strict

 - : int list = [0; 1; 2; 3; 5; 8; 10; 20] 

Entry point

The entry point for the zlist package is the Zlist module, which defines the type of a lazy list, Zlist.t.

Acknowledgements

This implementation is heavily inspired by "Functional Programming in Scala", by Chiusano and Bjarnason (2014).