  We revisit integrable discretizations for the nonlinear Schr\"odinger
equation due to Ablowitz and Ladik. We demonstrate how their main drawback, the
non-locality, can be overcome. Namely, we factorize the non-local difference
scheme into the product of local ones. This must improve the performance of the
scheme in the numerical computations dramatically. Using the equivalence of the
Ablowitz--Ladik and the relativistic Toda hierarchies, we find the
interpolating Hamiltonians for the local schemes and show how to solve them in
terms of matrix factorizations.
