From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2007-05-18T03:11:42+09:00
Subject: Re: "Crystallizing" Objects


On May 17, 2007, at 02:55 , Sven Suska wrote:

> Hello,
>
> in this post, I'd like to make a proposal to contribute
> to Ruby's fitness for the challenges of parallelization.
>
> The problem with sharing objects between threads
> is concurrent write access.
> If the objects were frozen,
> everything would be OK ... but also boring. :)
>
> Now, I think it should be possible
> to freeze the "already existing" data of an object
> and at the same time leave it open for "further growth".
> Especially, I have Hashes and Arrays in mind:
> New key/value pairs could be added to Hashes,
> objects could be appended to Arrays.

[...]

To get some clarification and help me understand better, how is this  
any different from purely functional data structures?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional_data_structure