Not sequential: you can treat it as a set (in the mathematical sense) and solve your problems as a set operation, eg: "I want all the numbers greater than one".

Not sequential: you can treat it as a set (in the mathematical sense) and solve your problems as a set operation, eg: "I want all the numbers greater than one". It makes it easy to read but also allows 1)not to deal with it until really needed (lazy eval) 2)partalellize the solution to n threads on m cores. Think list comprehension/generator in Python. Cons: you need more memory than you have data Sequential: you deal with one item at a time, you can deal with an infinite amount of data with a finite amount of memory. Cons: can't parralellize, early eval of things you don't need, you might need to go through the loop more than once.