Subj : Re: OO compilers and efficiency
To   : comp.programming
From : Vesa Karvonen
Date : Wed Jul 27 2005 11:24 am

Jon Harrop <usenet@jdh30.plus.com> wrote:
[...]
> In OCaml (probably SML too) you can also update record fields which have
> been marked "mutable". In fact, a "ref" is nothing more than a record with
> a single mutable field:

>   type 'a ref = { mutable contents: 'a }

In SML, ref is primitive and there is no "mutable" keyword. At least the
MLton compiler performs ref flattening, which flattens ref cells into
their containing objects. See:

   http://mlton.org/RefFlatten

-Vesa Karvonen

.