Sequence Types for Functional Languages
Edoardo Biagioni

The use of types such as arrays, lazy lists, and other sequential
types in Standard ML and other advanced languages can be made as
natural and useful as the use of lists.  These types are collectively
referred to as sequences.  This report presents a sequence interface
which can be satisfied by every sequence type regardless of the
details of representation, laziness or eagerness, extensibility, and
mutability of the specific data structure implementing the type.  In
addition, an implementation of a sequence type can satisfy more
detailed, specific interfaces, some of which are presented.  The
report also introduces operations for mutating arrays that allow the
same style of looping as the conventional list operations and can be
implemented efficiently on conventional architectures.  The array
interface is extended and specialized to allow efficient
implementations of byte arrays.