What does structural sharing means in List?

[Harit Himanshu]

I was reading List API and saw the following statement

Space: List implements structural sharing of the tail list. This means that many operations are either zero- or constant-memory cost.

So, what is the meaning of structural sharing? I did not understand meaning of this line at all

Thank you

[Som Snytt]

Sharing a data structure instead of making a defensive copy.

The old saying is that "two can live cheaper than one."

Anyone who has shared an apartment knows this is not easy.

Example peril: https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-8976

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[Chandu Kavar]

Hi Himanshu,

Suppose we have one list:  val  list = List(1,2,3) and we want to create a list of four elements 1 to 4. Then you can use the concept of structural sharing. what that means,
you can create list like:

val list2 = Cons(4,list)

Here, list shared his structure with list2. we can reduce the cost of creating list2 using structural sharing.

[Harit Himanshu]

Interesting, thanks a lot

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