I think what you are looking for is called "memoization" and is common in many functional programming languages such as Lisp; however many other languages have

I think what you are looking for is called "memoization" and is common in many functional programming languages such as Lisp; however many other languages have this readily available. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoization ; see the list of implementations at the bottom - there are ones for Lisp, Python, Perl, Java, etc.