For people who are interested in these things, I'd highly recommend Chris Okasaki's thesis/book on the topic. I was not familiar at all with this stuff when I

For people who are interested in these things, I'd highly recommend Chris Okasaki's thesis/book on the topic. I was not familiar at all with this stuff when I read through it the first time, so it was a tad mind-bending and I probably understood ~10% of it, but it was certainly educational. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf