Re: streams are cool, you could stream virtually anything!

[Michael Heerdegen]

John Wiegley <address@hidden> writes:

> Do you know the memory behavior of doing it this way? That is, for
> 1000 hits, how does the number of cons's allocated compare to the
> iterative approach?

That depends on whether you want/need to keep the matches so far.  If
you don't need to save prior matches, you can just

  (setq stream (stream-cdr stream))

after generating an element, and memory usage will be O(1).  (Note to
Nicolas: a `stream-pop' function would be nice in this context).

In that case, you can alternatively use generators (generator.el) or the
derived iterators.el.

If you keep the complete stream in memory, you get O(nbr-matches) conses
(of course).  Not much a problem IME, if you keep an eye on what you
want to keep and what you can throw away when using streams.


Regards,

Michael.