Purely Functional Data Structures

I'm excited to announce our talk for this month. Brian Howard, Associate Professor of Computer Science at DePauw University, will be presenting on Purely Functional Data Structures. This is a really neat topic that dives a bit deeper into the implementation details of data structures used in functional programming languages. If immutability is confusing or it is hard to imagine how an immutable data structure can be efficient, this is a talk you should definitely attend. I've attached the full description below.

As always, we will have free Bazbeaux's pizza, so please RSVP so we have enough.

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Purely Function Data Structures - Brian Howard

This month’s talk will be an introduction to purely functional data structures. Based on the work of Chris Okasaki, which influenced the implementation of standard library data structures in languages such as Haskell, Clojure, and Scala, we will cover the notions of immutability and persistence in the context of a variety of stacks, queues, and maps. We will also look at the use of laziness and the concept of amortization in analyzing the running time of operations on these structures. Is it practical? Maybe! Is it cool? Of course!