memo function

memo function

(programming)(Or "memoised function") A function thatremembers which arguments it has been called with and theresult returned and, if called with the same arguments again,returns the result from its memory rather than recalculatingit.

Memo functions were invented by Professor Donald Michie ofEdinburgh University. The idea was further developed byRobin Popplestone in his Pop2 language long before it wasever worked into LISP.

This same principle is found at the hardware level in computerarchitectures which use a cache to store recently accessedmemory locations.

A Common Lisp package by Marty Hallftp://archive.cs.umbc.edu/pub/Memoization.

["'Memo' functions: and machine learning", Donald Michie,Nature, 218, 19-22, 1968].