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Plan of the Chapter

This chapter provides a comparison between the functional and imperative models in the Objective CAML language, at the level both of control structure and of the memory representation of values. The mixture of these two styles allows new data structures to be created. The first section studies this comparison by example. The second section discusses the ingredients in the choice between composition of functions and sequencing of instructions, and in the choice between sharing and copying values. The third section brings out the interest of mixing these two styles to create mutable functional data, thus permitting data to be constructed without being completely evaluated. The fourth section describes streams, potentially infinite sequences of data, and their integration into the language via pattern-matching.


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