While discussing game scripting languages with a friend, I asserted that a Lisp-based language such as Scheme or Racket would form a very effective in-game scripting language due to its expressive power and flexibility, as well as the efficiency with which modern, JIT-capable implementations execute code. One of the most widely used scripting languages for this purpose appears to be Lua which is pretty small and designed to be embedded in C programs. I glanced over the feature list on Wikipedia and saw that it was basically a subset of Scheme with some omissions and a few additions. In particular, I really liked the idea of a metatable, which effectively automatically handled function memoization.

The example given on Wikipedia is a metatable-based function to calculate the nth Fibonacci number, a classic example of a simple recursive expression that has exponential time complexity for a naïve implementation, but can be improved to linear time (or, depending on the usage scenario, amortized constant time, for sufficient reuse) with a memoization table. The Lua for this is given (available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license from Wikipedia as:

fibs = { 1, 1 }
setmetatable(fibs, {
  __index = function(name, n)
    name[n] = name[n - 1] + name[n - 2]
    return name[n]
  end
})

I didn't recall seeing a Scheme or Racket built-in to provide the same functionality, but I was confident that it would be easy to implement such a language feature using standard Racket built-ins, such as the hash table. So, I started with a simple function that would check if a value for 'arg' existed in a given hash table, and if so, return that value, otherwise compute a value by applying the given function, storing the result, and then returning:

(define (memo-or-call ht fun arg)
  (if (hash-has-key? ht arg)
      (hash-ref ht arg)
      (let ((result (fun arg)))
        (hash-set! ht arg result)
        result)))

With this, I was able to define a hash table on my own, set up the default values, and then create an index function, which was pretty effective and enabled me to compute any Fibonacci number that I wanted almost instantly:

(define fibtable (make-hash))
(hash-set! fibtable 0 1)
(hash-set! fibtable 1 1)

(define (fib n)
  (memo-or-call fibtable
                (lambda (k) (+ (fib (- k 1)) (fib (- k 2))))
                n))

This is great, but it felt like it required too much template-like rewriting of code for each function that I wanted to provide table memoization for. I'd have to create a new hash table, add default values, and then use the "internal" function memo-or-call to create my memoization-capable function. To resolve this, I wrote another function that would take a lambda expression and wrap it with a hash table and call to the memoization function:

(define (mt-store-defaults tbl defaults)
  (cond
    [(empty? defaults) tbl]
    [else (hash-set! tbl (caar defaults) (cadar defaults))
          (mt-store-defaults tbl (cdr defaults))]))

(define (make-metatable fun defaults)
  (let ((tbl (mt-store-defaults (make-hash) defaults)))
    (lambda (k)
      (memo-or-call tbl fun k))))

This reduced the complexity of creating a new memorized function considerably, which brought me to functionality that was effectively equivalent to what was possible in Lua. It's worth noting that I'm strictly dealing with the case where a table is used to memorize computation; not the other usage cases, such as implementing classes or objects, although it would be possible to modify the idea here to include support for the __call magic function in Lua, and it is already possible to store functions in a hash table, as they are still first class objects. Scheme code implementing the now-table-based Fibonacci calculator

(define fib2
  (make-metatable
   (lambda (k) (+ (fib2 (- k 1)) (fib2 (- k 2))))
   '((0 1) (1 1))))

Therefore, in summary, a reasonable implementation of automatic memoization with "metatables" can be achieved with just a few lines of Scheme/Racket, allowing for concise definitions of memorized functions in user code. Note that this is just some example code and not really robust, but feel free to use it as a starting point.

#lang racket

(define (memo-or-call ht fun arg)
  (if (hash-has-key? ht arg)
      (hash-ref ht arg)
      (let ((result (fun arg)))
        (hash-set! ht arg result)
        result)))

(define (mt-store-defaults tbl defaults)
  (cond
    [(empty? defaults) tbl]
    [else (hash-set! tbl (caar defaults) (cadar defaults))
          (mt-store-defaults tbl (cdr defaults))]))

(define (make-metatable fun defaults)
  (let ((tbl (mt-store-defaults (make-hash) defaults)))
    (lambda (k)
      (memo-or-call tbl fun k))))