The Implementation and Efficiency of Arrays in Clean 1.1
John H. G. van Groningen

Computing Science Institute, University of Nijmegen
Toernooiveld 1, 6525 ED Nijmegen, The Netherlands
e-mail: johnvg@cs.kun.nl

Abstract
We present a new approach to implementing arrays in a pure lazy
functional programming language. The arrays can be updated destructively by
using uniqueness typing, and the elements can be unboxed. We describe the
implementation of these arrays in the functional programming language
Clean 1.1. The performance of two sorting algorithms and a fast fourier
transformation written in Clean using arrays is compared with similar
programs written in C. The current implementation of Clean is on average
about 25 percent slower than C for these programs.