One of my favorite themes in mentoring SICP has been the realizations about just how far-reaching traditional mutability’s implications are.
Conversation
could refs in a FP lang be replaced w 256bit hashes of the content they point to, unifying all refs throughout time & space?
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Interesting! The problem is *derived* values. If I compute some value based on a ref, it’s “poisoned” by that ref’s content.
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...though there is a cost to hash calculation, the upside is passing refs in distributed networks and caching in general
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Replying to
Ah, gotcha. Yes, it does make sense for those cases!