[mcguire]

"> My impression is that INRIA is too eager to add features and tweak the language.

"That's strange. I've always had the opposite impression - that they maintain compatibility at all costs, including leaving sub-optimal APIs in the standard library."

When I started using OCaml, many standard library functions weren't tail recursive---you couldn't get the length of a list with more than ~10,000 elements, for example. The library definitely seems like an afterthought compared with the language. (And that would be why there are so many of them.)

[zoren]

Why would you hold 10,000 elements in a linked list?

[fsloth]

That's just - for example - every point in 100×100 R^2 cartesian grid. 10k elements is not by any measure a 'large number of elements'.

Just pick your algorithmic use case for a good excuse to use list and not an array from here:

http://bigocheatsheet.com

[eru]

When you first write design your program, you might indeed use a different data structure than a linked list when you anticipate 10k+ elements.

But often programs are used long after they are designed, and it is great if they can degrade gracefully as you move outside their original design parameters.

[mcguire]

I couldn't hold them in my cupped palms.