EQUAL

[Jon L White <edsel!jonl@labrea.stanford.edu>]

    Date: Fri, 24 Jun 88 16:40:01 EST
    From: Jim McDonald <jlm>

    My concern about having EQUAL descend structures and arrays is that
    they are much more likely than lists to be circular.
    ...
    As a rule of thumb, I'd bet that less than .0001% of all lists are
    circular, and that less than 1% of all arrays are circular, but only
    that less than 30% of all structures are circular.  

Probabilities can be very misleading here -- for any given application,
the probability is typically either 0 or 1.  And even for those cases
that do utilize circular stucture (I'm including lists here), the 
relevance to the EQUAL question is entirely moot if they are never
given as arguments to EQUAL.  One would surely suspect that to be the
case for the many programs that deal in circular lists!


-- JonL  --