Howdy,
It looks like my news feed is not propagating so I'll try this again
via google, sorry for the delay. To save space I have thrown all my
thanks in below.
Barry - Thanks for confirming my fears, you described the
implementation I had in mind.
Steve H. - "42" a beautifully correct answer you get extra credit ;-)
Everybody else - I am sorry that I did not capture one important point
in my initial question which was that I am only concerned with the
final resulting structure in "abstract" terms.
I basically needed a generalized version length that I can call on the
resulting data structure. Just like length I don't care about how
much consing went into creating the structure, how it is implemented
in hardware or if it would be freed by a GC.
So if anybody is interested in the code to do what Barry described you
will have to look elsewhere ;-) As I was breaking out my copy of AMOP
to start writing it I got a bit of inspiration on how I could
effectively isolate and count the gozinta's and gozouta's in my
process. I was able to use that to get the measurements I needed.
Thanks for all the help,
-Eric