By Steven Lembark (Lembark) from stlouis.pm
Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 02:55 PM
Duration: 20 minutes
Target audience: Any
Language:
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Perly arrays are flexible, but there are still a few things that lists can help with. Memory management is one: linked lists return space to the free store as it is freed. Being able to walk multiple lists at once without having to use offsets for all of them is another. Both of these are boon for high-volume processing (e.g. bioinformatics). They also simplify granular locking in threaded applicatons.
Singly-linked lists are not complicated in Perl, and if done right can be quite fast. They do require a destructor, however, and reversing the standard picture of thier structure to work well.