Talk:Zipper (data structure)

Needs better explanations

This explanation doesn't seem very clear. It does not even mention that a zipper it a "tree like data structure", as the disambiguation page does.

Somebody who knows more about this stuff than me should try to make this article clearer. 84.137.103.239 16:43, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is way too abstract. The content on this page belongs more in generalization of notion “derivative” (for types) than the Zipper itself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.233.236.102 (talk) 21:51, 21 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wording

"... a purely functional data structure used in programming (particularly in functional programming)". This sounds confusing. Can a purely functional data structure be used in non-functional programming?--216.234.46.215 (talk) 04:26, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That is my fault, committed in the early ages of the article. Somehow I thought that it has already been fixed since long. Now I have removed the confusing suggestion of other programmer paradigms. Physis (talk) 09:21, 12 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It is of course possible to use FP techniques in non-FP language (they're all Turing-complete, after all) - for example, you can use monads in Python or C++, just to name two languages I've seen some folks do just that in. And zippers being a datastructure, there's nothing stopping imperative programmers from coding it up. On the other hand, I've never heard of zippers in anything but some sort of ML or Lisp, so if it's never been done... --Gwern (contribs) 14:52 29 June 2008 (GMT)

Analogy using sets

This article is supposed to be about zippers, and not about basic type theory. I removed the long section that said nothing recognizable about zippers. WillOakland (talk) 18:27, 2 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Anteriority

It seems to me that Henry Lieberman's Marcottage is an anterior expression of the exact same idea wihtout the "mathematical formalism" snobism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.234.244.169 (talk) 10:02, 25 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

More about "type derivatives"?

In the example, a zipper for a list of integers is two lists of integers, but the derivative of a list is something else entirely.

L(A, R) = 1 + A × R
d/dR L(A, R) = A

Perhaps more explanation or a link is appropriate. 75.5.199.65 (talk) 04:22, 27 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]