Are some data structures more suitable for functional programming than others?

Question

In Real World Haskell, there is a section titled \"Life without arrays or hash tables\" where the authors suggest that list and trees are preferred in functional programming, w

Answer 1

Chris Okasaki's thesis, Purely Functional Data Structures, is available for free online. It covers many different strategies for immutable persistent data representation.

As far as really needing a hash table, consider that an O(lg n) lookup is only twenty times as slow as an O(1) lookup when you are searching a million elements.